Occupation / job
Engineering Teachers, Postsecondary
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
$109,270 against a $50,020 national midpoint is 118% more, or $28.48 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 stands at 40,270. Engineering Teachers, Postsecondary is common enough to be recruited for continuously and specific enough that the experience travels — the combination that makes changing employer a working pay rise.
This work suits people who want to spend a career inside one subject, teaching it while contributing to it, and who can tolerate an institution whose incentives do not always favour either.
We carry no verified training length for Engineering Teachers, Postsecondary — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
A quarter of the field earns under $81,570 and a quarter over $150,860: $69,290 between them, a ratio of 1.8x. Wide enough that the first offer you get tells you more about your prospects than the median does.
The 25th percentile is $81,570, $31,550 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 the administrative and committee load would spoil the subject for you, because it is a large share of the week.
There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 40,270 people employed as Engineering Teachers, Postsecondary; 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.
What the spread tells you
A ratio of 1.8x — $81,570 to $150,860 — is wide enough that specialising inside Engineering Teachers, Postsecondary pays measurably. $109,270 is the middle of a range you can move within.
Put in money rather than ratios: $81,570 at the 25th percentile, $109,270 at the midpoint, $150,860 at the 75th. $69,290 separates the quarter of Engineering Teachers, Postsecondary at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Between $81,570 and $150,860 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $109,270. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $41,590; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $69,290.
$41,590 separates $109,270 from the $150,860 top quarter, while only $27,700 separates it from $81,570. The range leans upward, which means the middle of Engineering Teachers, Postsecondary has more room above it than a symmetric reading of the median would suggest.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Engineering Teachers, Postsecondary is $52.53 an hour. The quarters sit at $39.21 and $72.52, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
This is payroll data: it comes from employers, about people they employ. Anyone doing the work of Engineering Teachers, Postsecondary for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $109,270 describes them.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Engineering Teachers, Postsecondary, the hourly figure is $109,270 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