Occupation / job
Electrical 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
The $120,630 midpoint is $5,884 a month above the $50,020 typical American job, which puts Electrical Engineers near the ceiling of published federal wage data. Everything at this level is gated, and the gate is usually years long.
With 198,750 in the occupation, Electrical Engineers is a big field with a visible internal market. Big fields reward moving: the pay you can negotiate on arrival usually beats what the annual review will give you for staying.
Engineering suits people willing to be responsible for something that has to work in the physical world, where the review process exists because the failure mode is not a bug report.
No verified preparation time is on file for Electrical 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
From $92,830 to $152,950 is $5,010 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.
Even at the 25th percentile Electrical Engineers pays $92,830, $42,810 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 198,750 figure counts people already working as Electrical 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 $92,830 and $152,950 this is a normally shaped occupation. $120,630 is what the middle of Electrical 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: $92,830 at the 25th percentile, $120,630 at the midpoint, $152,950 at the 75th. $60,120 separates the quarter of Electrical Engineers at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Between $92,830 and $152,950 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $120,630. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $32,320; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $60,120.
The climb from $120,630 to $152,950 is $32,320; the drop to $92,830 is $27,800. A little more room above the midpoint than below it is the normal shape for Electrical Engineers and for most paid work, and it is the reason the median is the honest summary rather than the average.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $44.62 at the bottom quarter, $57.99 at the midpoint, $73.53 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 Electrical Engineers. The self-employed are excluded, so $120,630 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Electrical Engineers, the hourly figure is $120,630 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else