Marine Engineers and Naval Architects Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Marine Engineers and Naval Architects worker at that point in the distribution, so $133,780 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 8,440 Marine Engineers and Naval Architects jobs in May 2024, which is 0.01% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in District of Columbia, where the location quotient is 10.24, meaning the occupation holds 10.24 times its national share of local jobs. Virginia employs the most people outright, 1,880 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 36.1% of the national total.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $167,660, which is 2.1 times the $79,700 at the 10th, a difference of $87,960 annually. Because the mean wage ($116,680) sits above the median ($105,670), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Virginia first at 1,880 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, District of Columbia would lead at $166,750. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Marine Engineers and Naval Architects stands number 706 by employment and number 95 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 9% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.3% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 10 of the 19 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $105,670, 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

Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk, VA-NC is the largest metro employer with 1,810 jobs, 21.4% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk, VA-NC posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $107,520 a year, against $151,160 in Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $105,670 works out to $8,806 a month before taxes, $4,064 per biweekly paycheck, and $2,032 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($88,480) to the 75th ($133,780) is worth $45,300 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $116,237 would sit between the median ($105,670) and the 75th percentile ($133,780), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $88,480, is $17,190 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Architects, Except Landscape and Naval, Architectural and Civil Drafters, Electronics Engineers, Except Computer, Electrical and Electronic Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Computer Hardware Engineers, Industrial Engineering Technologists and Technicians. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.