Agricultural Engineers

$98,590 is $4,047 a month above the $50,020 the typical American job pays. Differences of that size in Agricultural Engineers are held in place by a barrier — a licence, a residency, a clearance — and the barrier is the real subject of this page.

There are 1,480 of these posts in the country. Plan on the assumption that the job will not appear where you already live, because on those numbers it usually will not.

Engineering suits people who want their work checked. Sign-off, code compliance and design review are the job, not friction added to it.

How long it takes to become one of the 1,480 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 $82,260 to $124,880 is $3,551 a month, or 1.5x 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.

The 25th percentile is $82,260, $32,240 above the $50,020 typical American job. When even the floor is this high, the thing to investigate is the entry requirement rather than the pay.

Avoid it if you resent process. Much of the day is producing evidence that the work is correct, not producing the work.

There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 1,480 people employed as Agricultural Engineers; 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 1.5x ratio is the most common shape in this data: some room to move, none of it quick. Read $98,590 as where you might be after years in Agricultural Engineers, and $82,260 as where you would start.

In cash terms the middle half of Agricultural Engineers runs $82,260 to $124,880 — $42,620 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $98,590.

Between $82,260 and $124,880 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $98,590. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $26,290; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $42,620.

The distance from the midpoint up to $124,880 is $26,290 — well over the $16,330 down to $82,260. Distributions leaning this way mean the median understates what the upper half of Agricultural Engineers earns, and half the field is in that upper half.

On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Agricultural Engineers is $47.39 an hour. The quarters sit at $39.54 and $60.03, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.