Occupation / job
Civil Engineers
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
$100,840 against a $50,020 national midpoint is 102% more, or $24.43 an hour. Almost nothing pays this much more without a long, expensive or restricted route in — read that route before reading the number again.
This is a large occupation: 367,840 people work as Civil Engineers. Large occupations hire continuously and replace continuously, and the pay reflects both facts.
Engineering suits people who want their work checked. Sign-off, code compliance and design review are the job, not friction added to it.
No verified preparation time is on file for Civil Engineers. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.
Who should not do this
$79,930 to $129,680 — 1.6x, or $4,145 a month between the quarters. An unremarkable spread, which means the useful planning number for Civil Engineers is the bottom of it rather than the middle.
Even at the 25th percentile Civil Engineers pays $79,930, $29,910 clear of the $50,020 national midpoint. Almost the entire distribution sits above the typical American wage, which is rare and worth weighing against the entry cost.
Avoid it if you would find the pace frustrating — the review and approval cycle is deliberately slower than the design work.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 367,840 figure counts people already working as Civil Engineers, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
At 1.6x between $79,930 and $129,680 this is a normally shaped occupation. $100,840 is what the middle of Civil Engineers earns after the years it takes to get there, which is not the same as what it offers you now.
Put in money rather than ratios: $79,930 at the 25th percentile, $100,840 at the midpoint, $129,680 at the 75th. $49,750 separates the quarter of Civil Engineers at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
The 75th percentile is $129,680. Reaching it from the $100,840 midpoint is $28,840 a year; reaching it from the $79,930 that the bottom quarter of Civil Engineers earn is $49,750.
The climb from $100,840 to $129,680 is $28,840, against $20,910 down to $79,930. Rather more of the range sits above the midpoint than below it, so the realistic upside in Civil Engineers is larger than the realistic downside.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $38.42 at the bottom quarter, $48.48 at the midpoint, $62.34 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Civil Engineers. The self-employed are excluded, so $100,840 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
The hourly number on this page is $100,840 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Civil Engineers, so it is arithmetic rather than an effective rate.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else