Engineers, All Other

$122,930 puts Engineers, All Other among the highest medians BLS publishes, roughly 146% above the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint. Pay at this level always has a gate in front of it: a residency, a bar exam, a clearance, or a decade.

154,070 people are employed as Engineers, All Other. At that size there is a real ladder and enough churn that experience can be sold to a competitor rather than only accumulated where you are.

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.

How long it takes to become one of the 154,070 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.

A quarter of the field earns under $90,970 and a quarter over $158,090: $67,120 between them, a ratio of 1.7x. Wide enough that the first offer you get tells you more about your prospects than the median does.

The bottom quarter of this field earns $90,970 — $43.73 an hour, $40,950 above the $50,020 national midpoint. When even the worst-paid quarter of Engineers, All Other is this far ahead, the barrier to entry is doing the work of keeping it there.

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 154,070 figure counts people already working as Engineers, All Other, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.

At 1.7x, the distribution for Engineers, All Other is open enough that specialisation starts to pay. The distance from $90,970 to $158,090 is mostly what you can do that others in the same title cannot.

The middle half of this field earns between $90,970 and $158,090. That is $67,120 of range, with $122,930 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.

Between $90,970 and $158,090 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $122,930. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $35,160; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $67,120.

$122,930 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $31,960 above the bottom quarter, $35,160 below the top one. A symmetric distribution like this is the case where the median genuinely does describe the typical person.

Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $59.10 at the midpoint for Engineers, All Other, $43.73 at the 25th percentile and $76.00 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.