Marine Engineers and Naval Architects

At $112,230 — $62,210 a year clear of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — Marine Engineers and Naval Architects sits at the top of what BLS publishes. Read the gate before the figure: at this level there is always one, and it is usually measured in years.

8,250 people work as Marine Engineers and Naval Architects. That is enough for a functioning national market and not enough for a functioning local one — in most metros this is a few employers rather than a field you can move around inside.

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 Marine Engineers and Naval Architects. 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.

Between $99,250 and $137,690 there is $38,440, a ratio of 1.4x. Tight distributions are predictable, and predictable cuts both ways: little risk of being badly underpaid, little prospect of doing much better.

Even at the 25th percentile Marine Engineers and Naval Architects pays $99,250, $49,230 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 resent process. Much of the day is producing evidence that the work is correct, not producing the work.

No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 8,250 figure counts people already working as Marine Engineers and Naval Architects, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.

$99,250 to $137,690 is a 1.4x range. Ranges this tight usually mean the employer set is homogeneous — the same kind of organisation paying the same kind of scale — so the lever you have is geography rather than employer.

Put in money rather than ratios: $99,250 at the 25th percentile, $112,230 at the midpoint, $137,690 at the 75th. $38,440 separates the quarter of Marine Engineers and Naval Architects at the bottom from the quarter at the top.

The 75th percentile is $137,690. Reaching it from the $112,230 midpoint is $25,460 a year; reaching it from the $99,250 that the bottom quarter of Marine Engineers and Naval Architects earn is $38,440.

From $112,230 the drop to $99,250 is $12,980 and the climb to $137,690 is $25,460. When the upper half of the range is that much longer, the average is pulled well above the median — which is exactly why this site publishes the median.

Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $53.95 at the midpoint for Marine Engineers and Naval Architects, $47.71 at the 25th percentile and $66.19 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.