What Biomedical/Medical Engineering Graduates Earn

Median earnings at 1, 4, and 5 years (College Scorecard)

Start with the shape of the table: Biomedical/Medical Engineering pays $72,751 at the first measured horizon and $100,258 at the last, and those two medians rest on 5,674 and 5,770 graduates counted respectively. The headline figures weight each reporting program by its graduates counted, so the 400-graduate program moves the national number more than the 12-graduate one; the unweighted column beside it shows the middle program, plain and simple.

The trajectory is the story here: $72,751 at year one, $95,682 at year four, $100,258 at year five. That is 38% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $27,507 a year by the fifth year. Fields with flat early curves repay debt slowly; this one's curve works in the borrower’s favor.

One more cut of the year-one data: Pell recipients in Biomedical/Medical Engineering post a median of $71,151, non-recipients $74,295. That $3,144 gap is the distance between two different student populations studying under one field name, and it narrows or widens by institution, which the program table below hints at.

Inside its own CIP family, Biomedical/Medical Engineering ranks 8 of 17 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $97,669. Its closest sibling is Aerospace, Aeronautical, and Astronautical/Space Engineering at $101,725, above this field's $100,258. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Biomedical/Medical Engineering stands number 12 by five-year earnings and number 21 by first-year earnings, and number 109 from the lowest median debt. Those three ranks together are the field's fingerprint: high earn rank with a low debt rank is the combination students are actually shopping for, and this field's spread between them is 97 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $21,500 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 123 programs reporting debt. That is 30% of the first-year median earnings, or about 3.5 months of gross pay at $72,751 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $244 a month and interest adds $7,822 over the life of the loan. Price your own borrowing with the student loan payoff calculator, and test the whole degree in the college ROI calculator or the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

Program medians scatter widely around the national $100,258 five-year figure. The table ranks the reporting programs by their five-year median, keeping only programs with at least 30 graduates in that count so a tiny cohort cannot top the list by luck. University of Virginia-Main Campus leads it at $129,993.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of University of Virginia-Main Campus's counted graduates earn less than $129,993. Weigh any program here against its own price using the net price estimator and the degree cost calculator.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 4.2% of the 5,770 graduates counted at five years, so the top of the table is a thin slice and not the field's center; and the leading program's five-year median of $129,993 sits 30% above the national field median of $100,258. Its median debt, $17,500, runs below the field median of $21,500, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.