What Mechanical Engineering Graduates Earn

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

Nothing on this page is a survey response or a recruiter's claim: the $75,796 year-one median and the $95,975 year-five median for Mechanical Engineering come from federal earnings records pooled across 424 bachelor's programs. The headline median weights programs by graduates counted (40,369 at year one); the second column is the unweighted median program, printed so the method stays visible.

The trajectory is the story here: $75,796 at year one, $90,768 at year four, $95,975 at year five. That is 27% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $20,179 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 Mechanical Engineering post a median of $74,937, non-recipients $77,230. That $2,293 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, Mechanical Engineering ranks 11 of 17 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $97,669. Its closest sibling is Architectural Engineering at $96,182, above this field's $95,975. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Mechanical Engineering stands number 24 by five-year earnings and number 15 by first-year earnings, and number 107 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 83 places.

The debt side of the same degree

What does the median Mechanical Engineering graduate owe? $21,406, the graduate-weighted median over 322 programs with published debt figures. The ratio that matters is debt to first-year earnings: 28%, or 3.4 months of gross pay at the $75,796 median. At the 2026-27 undergraduate loan rate of 6.52%, the standard decade of repayment is $243 a month with $7,787 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 Mechanical Engineering among programs with at least 30 graduates in the count, led by University of Pennsylvania at $139,684, against a national field median of $95,975.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of University of Pennsylvania's counted graduates earn less than $139,684. 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 0.7% of the 40,454 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 $139,684 sits 46% above the national field median of $95,975. Its graduates' debt figure is not published, one of the gaps this page leaves visible rather than filling.