Occupation / job
Ship 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 $109,530 against a $50,020 national midpoint, Ship Engineers pays 119% more than the typical American job — $59,510 a year of difference. Read the entry requirements before the number.
8,400 people work as Ship Engineers. 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.
Water transportation suits people who can be away from home for the length of a voyage or a hitch, and who want the compressed time off that comes with it.
No verified preparation time is on file for Ship Engineers. 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.
Who should not do this
A quarter earn below $82,130 and a quarter above $135,760: a 1.7x ratio, $53,630 between the ends. That is an ordinary working spread, which also means experience and location explain most of it and there is no shortcut through the middle.
Even at the 25th percentile Ship Engineers pays $82,130, $32,110 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 weeks or months away from home at a time would not work for the people you live with.
There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 8,400 people employed as Ship Engineers; 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 1.7x ratio is the most common shape in this data: some room to move, none of it quick. Read $109,530 as where you might be after years in Ship Engineers, and $82,130 as where you would start.
Put in money rather than ratios: $82,130 at the 25th percentile, $109,530 at the midpoint, $135,760 at the 75th. $53,630 separates the quarter of Ship Engineers at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Between $82,130 and $135,760 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $109,530. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $26,230; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $53,630.
$27,400 down to $82,130, $26,230 up to $135,760: the midpoint of Ship Engineers is centred in its own middle half. That symmetry is why the median and the average would say much the same thing here, which is not true of most pages on this site.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $39.48 at the bottom quarter, $52.65 at the midpoint, $65.26 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Ship Engineers. The self-employed are excluded, so $109,530 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
The hourly number on this page is $109,530 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Ship Engineers, so it is arithmetic rather than an effective rate.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else