Petroleum 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 Petroleum Engineers ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $107,330. 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

BLS counted 18,970 Petroleum Engineers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.01% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Wyoming, where the location quotient is 9.48, meaning the occupation holds 9.48 times its national share of local jobs. Texas employs the most people outright, 10,640 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 69.2% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $107,330 at the 25th percentile, $141,280 at the middle, $191,100 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $149,950, a ratio of 2.9 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

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 24 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Alaska at $200,750; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Petroleum Engineers stands number 571 by employment and number 37 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 46% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.7% of the group's 2,567,220 jobs. In 8 of the 23 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $141,280, 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

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX is the largest metro employer with 5,080 jobs, 26.8% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 43 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, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $162,800 a year, against $177,460 in Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO. 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: $11,773 a month before tax, $5,434 biweekly, $2,717 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($107,330) to the 75th ($191,100) is worth $83,770 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 $155,408 would sit between the median ($141,280) and the 75th percentile ($191,100), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $107,330, is $33,950 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: Electronics Engineers, Except Computer, Electrical and Electronic Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Computer Hardware Engineers, Industrial Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Aerospace Engineers, Engineering Technologists and Technicians, Except Drafters, All Other. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.