What Construction Engineering Graduates Earn

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

The three rows below are the whole earnings story Scorecard can tell about Construction Engineering: $79,703, then $102,312, then $107,473. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 13 programs at year one and 12 at year five, and the unweighted program median sits alongside so a reader can see how much the weighting itself is doing.

Earnings in this field climb $27,770 between the first and fifth year, a 35% rise that beats the all-fields pattern (the median field in this dataset pays $45,010 at year one and $65,763 at year five). Early-career growth this shape usually means the first job is a foothold: licensure, a portfolio, or a first promotion does the heavy lifting.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $79,703 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $78,209, and graduates who did not earn $78,291, a gap of $82. Read it as a map of where each group studied and the networks they carried in, not as the degree paying two different wages for the same work.

Inside its own CIP family, Construction Engineering ranks 3 of 17 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $97,669. Its closest sibling is Industrial Engineering at $105,216, below this field's $107,473. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Construction Engineering stands number 5 by five-year earnings and number 8 by first-year earnings, and number 97 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 92 places.

The debt side of the same degree

What does the median Construction Engineering graduate owe? $20,875, the graduate-weighted median over 12 programs with published debt figures. The ratio that matters is debt to first-year earnings: 26%, or 3.1 months of gross pay at the $79,703 median. At the 2026-27 undergraduate loan rate of 6.52%, the standard decade of repayment is $237 a month with $7,594 of interest on top. Model a different balance in the student loan payoff calculator before you borrow it, and sanity-check the degree in the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

Where a student studies inside this field matters at least as much as the field itself. These five programs post the strongest five-year medians in Construction Engineering among programs with at least 30 graduates in the count, led by California State University-Sacramento at $122,595, against a national field median of $107,473.

A program median describes that program's own graduates in that program's own labor market; California State University-Sacramento at $122,595 is evidence about a place and a mix of students, not a wage offer. Put the same programs' prices next to these figures with the degree cost calculator and the net price estimator before ranking anything.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 58.3% of the 569 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 $122,595 sits 14% above the national field median of $107,473. Its median debt, $18,750, runs below the field median of $20,875, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.