Aerospace Engineering and Operations Technologists and Technicians

$82,890 against a $50,020 national midpoint is 66% more, or $15.80 an hour. Almost nothing pays this much more without a long, expensive or restricted route in — read that route before reading the number again.

Employment as Aerospace Engineering and Operations Technologists and Technicians is 11,280 nationally. At that size a large city holds a working market and a small one holds almost none, so where you live changes the number of employers available to you by an order of magnitude.

Technician and drafting roles suit people who want the technical work without the liability of the stamp, and who are good at being exactly right about details someone else specified.

How long it takes to become one of the 11,280 people doing this is not something we have a source for. BLS counts and pays them; it does not record how they got there, and we would rather say so than guess.

From $67,680 to $111,280 is $3,633 a month, or 1.6x bottom quarter to top. An ordinary spread like this is mostly years and geography; assume you enter near the bottom of it and that closing the gap takes a career rather than a move.

At $67,680, or $32.53 an hour, the 25th percentile sits $17,660 above the $50,020 the typical American job pays. Occupations with floors this high almost always have a requirement holding them there.

Avoid it if you would find it frustrating to execute someone else’s design decisions without the authority to change them.

There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 11,280 people employed as Aerospace Engineering and Operations Technologists and Technicians; it did not count the people who trained for it and are doing something else, and a rate built without that denominator would be a number we made up.

A 1.6x ratio is the most common shape in this data: some room to move, none of it quick. Read $82,890 as where you might be after years in Aerospace Engineering and Operations Technologists and Technicians, and $67,680 as where you would start.

In cash terms the middle half of Aerospace Engineering and Operations Technologists and Technicians runs $67,680 to $111,280 — $43,600 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $82,890.

The 75th percentile is $111,280. Reaching it from the $82,890 midpoint is $28,390 a year; reaching it from the $67,680 that the bottom quarter of Aerospace Engineering and Operations Technologists and Technicians earn is $43,600.

The distance from the midpoint up to $111,280 is $28,390 — well over the $15,210 down to $67,680. Distributions leaning this way mean the median understates what the upper half of Aerospace Engineering and Operations Technologists and Technicians earns, and half the field is in that upper half.

Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $39.85 at the midpoint for Aerospace Engineering and Operations Technologists and Technicians, $32.53 at the 25th percentile and $53.50 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.