Which Engineering Job Pays the Most in 2026?

Computer hardware engineers lead the 27 engineering and computing titles with a $161,740 median, ahead of petroleum engineers ($144,910) and computer and information research scientists ($140,300), the closest BLS home for AI and machine-learning researchers.^[a]

Software developers come in fifth at $135,980, but they are by far the largest group, with 1,687,890 workers. Web developers close the table at $92,650, so the gap from first to last is $69,090, a 1.75x spread.

This page ranks by median, not mean. Means are higher than medians for every one of the 27 titles, so you will see bigger headline numbers elsewhere.^[b]

If you want the highest typical paycheck from a government wage survey, build chips: hardware engineering beats every other engineering title in this data.

For years BLS printed any wage above $239,200 as just "$239,200 or more", which hid the top of some pay tables. That cap is gone.^[c] In the May 2025 data only one engineering title, petroleum engineers, has a 90th percentile above it, at $253,200.

Look at the top end, not the middle. The widest spreads belong to web developers (1.75x, from $92,650 to $162,290) and petroleum engineers (1.75x, from $144,910 to $253,200). Computer hardware engineers have the narrowest at 1.39x.

Across all 27 titles the typical spread is 1.56x. A mechanical engineer in the top 10% earns $164,340, about the same as the median hardware engineer ($161,740).

So switching specialty within engineering moves your median far less than you might expect. Seniority, location and employer matter more than the job title.

BLS has no title for AI engineer or machine-learning engineer, and it counts wages only. Levels.fyi, which collects self-reported total pay (base, stock and bonus), puts machine learning engineers at a $282,950 median and research scientists at $300,000. Software engineers overall sit at $198,000.^[d]

Where the two sources overlap, total pay runs from 0.96x the BLS wage for security analysts to 2.14x for research scientists ($300,000 against $140,300). Software engineers are 1.46x and hardware engineers 1.42x.

Traditional engineering gets far less lift: mechanical engineers report $125,000 (1.20x the BLS wage) and electrical engineers $128,500 (1.07x).

AI titles pay like a different job market, but the samples are modest (339 reports for AI engineers, 864 for research scientists) and skew to large US tech employers. Treat them as an upper band, not a typical offer.

Computer hardware engineers gained 44.8% since 2015, from $111,730 to $161,740, the most of the 22 engineering titles with a comparable history. Information security analysts gained 43.3%. Petroleum engineers gained just 11.5%.

The headcount-weighted average across the 22 titles rose 28.8%, from $89,466 to $115,196.^[e] Prices rose 35.2% over the same period, so only 4 of 22 titles outpaced inflation. On the chart, the average kept pace with prices until 2020, then fell behind when inflation jumped: by 2022 it stood at 115.6 against 122.9 for prices (2015 = 100), and it never caught up. Of the eight titles plotted, only hardware engineers and information security analysts finished above the prices line; web developers and health and safety engineers also beat inflation but are not plotted.

Software developers and data scientists have no comparable 2015 series because their occupation codes changed. Since 2021, software developers rose 12.6% ($120,730 to $135,980) and data scientists 19.1% ($100,910 to $120,230), against 19.4% for prices.

High pay is a level, not a growth trajectory, and small titles swing wildly in this series.^[f]

The 27 titles employ 4,574,960 workers in total. Software developers alone are 1,687,890 of them, 37% of the table. After them come Civil Engineers (367,840), Industrial Engineers (365,740) and Mechanical Engineers (296,810).

The best-paid title is mid-sized: computer hardware engineers number 76,660, about 1 for every 22 software developers. The smallest group is agricultural engineers with just 1,480 workers, and BLS rates that count as imprecise.

Where these counts come from. Every number here is from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey, May 2025 (BLS technical note), and covers the United States only. BLS surveys employers, not individual workers, so there are no personal respondents: it samples about 1.1 million establishments from state unemployment-insurance records over a rolling three-year cycle. It leaves out the self-employed, owners and partners in unincorporated firms, unpaid family workers and household workers, so an engineer who runs their own consultancy may not be in these counts. In the chart, orange boxes are computing and data titles and blue boxes are classical engineering.

The five biggest titles hold most of the headcount. The top of the pay table is a much smaller club than the part of the table most people actually work in.

The 27 titles offer about 277,400 openings a year. Software developers alone get 95,300, 34% of the total, followed by data scientists (24,800), industrial engineers (23,100) and civil engineers (22,700).

The best-paid titles hire the least: computer hardware engineers get 4,100 openings a year and petroleum engineers 1,000.

Growth tells a different story. Data scientists lead at +34.6% for 2025-35, then research scientists (+21.8%) and information security analysts (+21.0%). Computer programmers are the only shrinking title (-7.3%). 26 of the 27 titles list a bachelor's degree as the entry level; research scientists list a master's.^[g]

If you want a six-figure engineering job you can actually be hired into, compare openings first, then pay. Projections are not live job ads.^[h]