Sound Engineering Technicians Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Sound Engineering Technicians worker at that point in the distribution, so $99,950 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

With 13,050 jobs nationally, Sound Engineering Technicians make up 0.01% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 3,800 of those jobs, the top three states hold 48.2%, and the deepest concentration sits in California (location quotient 2.48, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $47,680 at the 25th percentile, $66,430 at the middle, $99,950 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $98,380, a ratio of 3.7 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, 37 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is New Jersey at $111,580; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Sound Engineering Technicians stands number 642 by employment and number 315 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations, the group median wage is $66,220 across 36 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 0% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.7% of the group's 1,989,300 jobs. In 11 of the 37 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $66,430, 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

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 2,800 jobs, 21.5% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $89,470 a year, against $97,120 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $5,536 a month before tax, $2,555 biweekly, $1,278 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($47,680) to the 75th ($99,950) is worth $52,270 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 $73,073 would sit between the median ($66,430) and the 75th percentile ($99,950), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $47,680, is $18,750 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations

Sibling occupations in Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations: Camera Operators, Television, Video, and Film, Broadcast Announcers and Radio Disc Jockeys, Media and Communication Workers, All Other, Special Effects Artists and Animators, Broadcast Technicians, Fashion Designers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.