Industrial Engineers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($70,000) to the 90th ($157,140). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 350,230 people in May 2024, 0.23% of every job BLS counted. Michigan is the largest employer at 31,850 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 24.9% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Michigan, whose location quotient of 3.19 says this work is 3.19 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $81,910 at the 25th percentile, $101,140 at the middle, $127,480 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $87,140, a ratio of 2.2 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Alaska at $142,980; the jobs leader is Michigan:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Industrial Engineers stands number 104 by employment and number 119 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Architecture and Engineering Occupations, the group median wage is $96,690 across 36 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 5% more than its group median, and it supplies 13.6% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 23 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $101,140, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI is the largest metro employer with 17,080 jobs, 4.9% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $85,820 a year, against $145,460 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $101,140 a year is $8,428 a month gross, $3,890 every two weeks, $1,945 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($81,910) to the 75th ($127,480) is worth $45,570 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $8,428 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $111,254 would sit between the median ($101,140) and the 75th percentile ($127,480), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $81,910, is $19,230 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Architecture and Engineering Occupations

Sibling occupations in Architecture and Engineering Occupations: Architectural and Civil Drafters, Electronics Engineers, Except Computer, Electrical and Electronic Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Computer Hardware Engineers, Industrial Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Aerospace Engineers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.