Materials Engineers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Materials Engineers ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $85,820. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 22,770 people in May 2024, 0.01% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 2,760 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 27.5% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Montana, whose location quotient of 2.40 says this work is 2.40 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $103,960 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($172,000) is 2.5 times the 10th percentile ($68,040), a gap of $103,960 a year. The mean of $116,380 sitting above the median of $108,310 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 47 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Washington at $140,810; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Materials Engineers stands number 532 by employment and number 87 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 12% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.9% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 14 of the 46 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $108,310, 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

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 1,160 jobs, 5.1% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 94 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $101,570 a year, against $152,420 in Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $9,026 a month before tax, $4,166 biweekly, $2,083 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($85,820) to the 75th ($138,370) is worth $52,550 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $119,141 would sit between the median ($108,310) and the 75th percentile ($138,370), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $85,820, is $22,490 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: Nuclear Engineers, Electro-Mechanical and Mechatronics Technologists and Technicians, Cartographers and Photogrammetrists, Environmental Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Aerospace Engineering and Operations Technologists and Technicians, Marine Engineers and Naval Architects. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.