Engineering Services

At a $24,203 median in gross receipts, the typical person under this code is running a real but part-time operation. Full-time equivalence would require roughly triple this before costs.

88,089 people filed under this code. That is enough that Engineering Services has a going local rate in most places, and enough that you will be quoted against someone else.

19.4% of filers grossed $100,000 or more, which is high for this dataset. A substantial share of this field is running an actual business rather than an occasional one.

Independent professional work suits people who can carry the whole business — delivery, sales, admin and collections — because with no employees all four are one person’s week.

There is no qualification, licence or minimum to appear in this data — you file and you are counted. Read the receipts distribution as the price of that: no barrier at the door means no filter before the numbers.

The top quarter of Engineering Services earns 10.4x the bottom quarter — under $7,709 against over $80,345, a spread of $72,636. Distributions this stretched are usually two different jobs sharing one label, and any average across them means little.

The bottom quarter of Engineering Services earns under $7,709 — $42,311 below the $50,020 a typical American job pays. Entering at the bottom and waiting is a live risk here, not a theoretical one, and some people never leave that quarter.

Do not start this if you dislike selling. Skill is not the constraint in this subsector — client acquisition is, and it never stops being.

31.1% — 27,404 of the 88,089 filers in 2022 — grossed under $10,000 for the year. That is not the tail of the distribution, it is a third of it, and it is measured before any expense came out.

That share is a floor, not an estimate: $10,000 is revenue, not earnings. Everyone counted inside it kept less than $10,000, and an unknown number of the filers above it also finished the year with nothing after costs.

A ratio of 10.4x between the quarters is the signature of a winner-take-most distribution. $24,203 is a real number about a real population, but nobody entering Engineering Services should plan around it.

The middle half of this field earns between $7,709 and $80,345. That is $72,636 of range, with $24,203 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.

Getting to $80,345, the 75th percentile, is worth $56,142 a year more than the $24,203 midpoint and $72,636 more than the $7,709 a quarter of Engineering Services settle for.

$16,494 below the midpoint, $56,142 above it. That asymmetry is extreme even for this data, and it means every summary of Engineering Services that is not a median — including any average you see quoted elsewhere — is describing the top of the range rather than the middle.

Converted to a 2,080-hour year, the receipts run $3.70 an hour at the 25th percentile, $11.63 at the midpoint and $38.62 at the 75th. Read them as revenue per hour worked; the equivalent wage is lower by whatever this work costs to do.

Counted straight off the return: 15,653 filers grossed under $5,000, 11,755 took $5,000 to $9,999, 17,570 took $10,000 to $24,999, 17,061 cleared $100,000 and 5,246 cleared $250,000.