Sales 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 Sales Engineers ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $90,690. 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 56,690 Sales Engineers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.04% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Colorado, where the location quotient is 2.56, meaning the occupation holds 2.56 times its national share of local jobs. Texas employs the most people outright, 8,870 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 33.6% of the national total.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $132,090 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($202,670) is 2.9 times the 10th percentile ($70,580), a gap of $132,090 a year. The mean of $130,410 sitting above the median of $121,520 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 District of Columbia at $179,490; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Sales Engineers stands number 368 by employment and number 70 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Sales and Related Occupations, the group median wage is $56,320 across 22 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 116% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 13,351,670 jobs. In 16 of the 43 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $121,520, 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

Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX is the largest metro employer with 4,490 jobs, 7.9% 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, Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $103,420 a year, against $177,330 in Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ. 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: $10,127 a month before tax, $4,674 biweekly, $2,337 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($90,690) to the 75th ($159,200) is worth $68,510 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 $133,672 would sit between the median ($121,520) and the 75th percentile ($159,200), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $90,690, is $30,830 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Sales and Related Occupations

Sibling occupations in Sales and Related Occupations: Insurance Sales Agents, Counter and Rental Clerks, Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Technical and Scientific Products, Parts Salespersons, First-Line Supervisors of Non-Retail Sales Workers, Real Estate Sales Agents. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.