Mechanical Drafters 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 ($46,500) to the 90th ($107,600). 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

May 2024 employment stood at 39,900, or 0.03% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 3,460 jobs; the top three states sum to 22.4% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Wisconsin posts a location quotient of 2.65, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $56,470 at the 25th percentile, $68,510 at the middle, $85,580 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $61,100, a ratio of 2.3 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

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Texas first at 3,460 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, New Mexico would lead at $85,220. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Mechanical Drafters stands number 428 by employment and number 294 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 29% less than its group median, and it supplies 1.6% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 20 of the 48 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $68,510, 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

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 1,440 jobs, 3.6% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 191 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, Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $55,940 a year, against $98,150 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: $5,709 a month before tax, $2,635 biweekly, $1,318 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($56,470) to the 75th ($85,580) is worth $29,110 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 $75,361 would sit between the median ($68,510) and the 75th percentile ($85,580), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $56,470, is $12,040 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: Bioengineers and Biomedical Engineers, Chemical Engineers, Electrical and Electronics Drafters, Landscape Architects, Petroleum Engineers, Drafters, All Other. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.