Stationary Engineers and Boiler Operators Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Stationary Engineers and Boiler Operators offer sit among all 30,780 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

The occupation employed 30,780 people in May 2024, 0.02% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 7,800 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 44.9% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in District of Columbia, whose location quotient of 2.90 says this work is 2.90 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $60,110 at the 25th percentile, $75,190 at the middle, $96,420 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $73,890, a ratio of 2.6 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

Illinois posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $112,230, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Stationary Engineers and Boiler Operators stands number 478 by employment and number 252 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Production Occupations, the group median wage is $46,020 across 105 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 63% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 14 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $75,190, 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

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 3,490 jobs, 11.3% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 122 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, San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $69,780 a year, against $107,540 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. 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

As a household number, $75,190 a year is $6,266 a month gross, $2,892 every two weeks, $1,446 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($60,110) to the 75th ($96,420) is worth $36,310 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 $6,266 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 $82,709 would sit between the median ($75,190) and the 75th percentile ($96,420), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $60,110, is $15,080 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Production Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Fabric and Apparel Patternmakers, Sewers, Hand, Patternmakers, Metal and Plastic, Model Makers, Wood, Timing Device Assemblers and Adjusters, Patternmakers, Wood. The full directory is on the Careers hub.