Occupation / job
Sound Engineering Technicians
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
Sound Engineering Technicians pays $73,130 at the midpoint, 46% above the $50,020 national figure. Premiums that size are rationed by something; find out what before the salary does your thinking for you.
Nationally 13,080 people do this. That is a real occupation with a thin local presence — enough that Sound Engineering Technicians is a career, not enough that you can assume a second employer down the road.
These roles suit people who want a technical craft attached to a creative industry, and who are content that the credit for the result goes elsewhere.
How long it takes to become one of the 13,080 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
A quarter earn under $49,910, a quarter over $100,280: $4,197 a month between them at a 2.0x ratio. Planning around the midpoint of a spread this wide is planning around a number very few people in Sound Engineering Technicians actually earn.
The 25th percentile is $49,910, $110 above the $50,020 typical American job. A floor above the national midpoint is rare, and it is worth more than an equivalent amount of upside.
Avoid it if unsociable hours would not work — the production schedule is not yours to set.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 13,080 figure counts people already working as Sound Engineering Technicians, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
At 2.0x the range from $49,910 to $100,280 is doing more explaining than the job title is. Something sorts people across that distance — sector, speciality, or who employs them — and finding out what it is matters more than the $73,130 midpoint.
The middle half of this field earns between $49,910 and $100,280. That is $50,370 of range, with $73,130 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Getting to $100,280, the 75th percentile, is worth $27,150 a year more than the $73,130 midpoint and $50,370 more than the $49,910 a quarter of Sound Engineering Technicians settle for.
The climb from $73,130 to $100,280 is $27,150; the drop to $49,910 is $23,220. A little more room above the midpoint than below it is the normal shape for Sound Engineering Technicians and for most paid work, and it is the reason the median is the honest summary rather than the average.
Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $35.15 at the midpoint for Sound Engineering Technicians, $23.99 at the 25th percentile and $48.21 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 Sound Engineering Technicians for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $73,130 describes them.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Sound Engineering Technicians, the hourly figure is $73,130 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