Occupation / job
Sales 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
At $124,900 — $74,880 a year clear of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — Sales Engineers 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.
Employment stands at 51,790. Sales Engineers 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.
These roles suit people who can generate their own pipeline, since nobody hands you one and the income follows directly from it.
How long it takes to become one of the 51,790 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.
Who should not do this
$68,340 separates the bottom quarter of Sales Engineers at $92,890 from the top quarter at $161,230. At a 1.7x ratio the midpoint is a weak guide to your own first year — find out which end you would be entering at.
The bottom quarter of this field earns $92,890 — $44.65 an hour, $42,870 above the $50,020 national midpoint. When even the worst-paid quarter of Sales Engineers is this far ahead, the barrier to entry is doing the work of keeping it there.
Avoid it if you could not fund a slow start — in these roles the early months routinely pay very little.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 51,790 is a headcount of the employed, which is a numerator without a denominator — everyone who qualified and never got hired is missing from it, and we will not estimate them to complete a percentage.
What the spread tells you
From $92,890 to $161,230 at a ratio of 1.7x is wide enough that two people with the same job title have materially different jobs. $124,900 sits in the middle of that and describes neither of them especially well.
The middle half of this field earns between $92,890 and $161,230. That is $68,340 of range, with $124,900 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
The 75th percentile is $161,230. Reaching it from the $124,900 midpoint is $36,330 a year; reaching it from the $92,890 that the bottom quarter of Sales Engineers earn is $68,340.
$124,900 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $32,010 above the bottom quarter, $36,330 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 $60.04 at the midpoint for Sales Engineers, $44.65 at the 25th percentile and $77.51 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.
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 Sales Engineers for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $124,900 describes them.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Sales Engineers, the hourly figure is $124,900 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