Mechanical 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 ($68,740) to the 90th ($161,240). 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

BLS counted 286,760 Mechanical Engineers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.19% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Michigan, where the location quotient is 3.90, meaning the occupation holds 3.90 times its national share of local jobs. Michigan employs the most people outright, 31,830 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 27.1% of the national total.

One in ten workers in this field earns $68,740 or less, and one in ten earns $161,240 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.3 to 1 and the annual gap is $92,500. The mean ($110,080) versus median ($102,320) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Michigan first at 31,830 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, New Mexico would lead at $141,490. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Mechanical Engineers stands number 127 by employment and number 109 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 6% more than its group median, and it supplies 11.2% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 21 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $102,320, 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 19,740 jobs, 6.9% 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, Lancaster, PA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $91,670 a year, against $159,270 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. 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

As a household number, $102,320 a year is $8,527 a month gross, $3,935 every two weeks, $1,968 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($81,800) to the 75th ($130,290) is worth $48,490 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 $8,527 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 $112,552 would sit between the median ($102,320) and the 75th percentile ($130,290), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $81,800, is $20,520 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: Surveying and Mapping Technicians, Surveyors, Mechanical Drafters, Environmental Engineers, Mechanical Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Health and Safety Engineers, Except Mining Safety Engineers and Inspectors. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.