Nuclear Engineers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Nuclear Engineers offer sit among all 14,740 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 14,740 Nuclear Engineers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.01% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in New Mexico, where the location quotient is 14.11, meaning the occupation holds 14.11 times its national share of local jobs. Texas employs the most people outright, 1,470 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 28.1% of the national total.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $187,430, which is 2.1 times the $88,290 at the 10th, a difference of $99,140 annually. Because the mean wage ($134,980) sits above the median ($127,520), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 26 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is District of Columbia at $189,800; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Nuclear Engineers stands number 612 by employment and number 58 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 32% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.6% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 16 of the 24 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $127,520, 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

Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN is the largest metro employer with 750 jobs, 5.1% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $136,170 a year, against $136,170 in Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $10,627 a month before tax, $4,905 biweekly, $2,452 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($103,010) to the 75th ($157,600) is worth $54,590 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 $140,272 would sit between the median ($127,520) and the 75th percentile ($157,600), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $103,010, is $24,510 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: Cartographers and Photogrammetrists, Environmental Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Aerospace Engineering and Operations Technologists and Technicians, Marine Engineers and Naval Architects, Mining and Geological Engineers, Including Mining Safety Engineers, Agricultural Engineers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.