Electrical Engineer Salary in Chicago, IL 2026,
$113,520 Median | BLS + Market Data

Chicago electrical engineers earn a BLS median of $113,520/yr, or $54.58 an hour, across the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin metro, with a published band from $76,660 to $165,890. That is 5.9% below the US median for the occupation. BLS counts 4,290 electrical engineers in the metro.

Yes, clearly — the metro runs 5.2% above the Illinois statewide figure, one of the wider intra-state gaps among the engineering disciplines. Utility headquarters functions, large building projects and industrial engineering are concentrated here. Among peer metros Chicago sits below Dallas at $124,390 and Denver at $119,020, and above San Antonio at $103,520, Charlotte at $103,360 and Miami at $102,800.

Because the national median for this occupation is lifted by places Chicago does not compete with. Electrical engineering pay nationally is pulled upward by semiconductor design, technology hardware and defence electronics clusters concentrated in a handful of metros, where compensation structures resemble software more than infrastructure. Chicago's electrical engineering is utilities, buildings, industrial systems and increasingly data centre power. That work is essential and steady, and it is not priced the way chip design is.

The data centre build-out across this region has become one of the strongest sources of demand for power systems engineers, and it is visible in how quickly those roles fill and what they pay. A hyperscale facility needs substation-scale power distribution, redundancy design, protection coordination and commissioning, all of which require the same skills as utility engineering — and there are not enough engineers with them. That competition sits behind much of the space between the median and the $165,890 at the top of this published band.

For sealed work, yes. Building power design submitted for permit and much utility and public infrastructure engineering require a licensed Professional Engineer, issued statewide by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation after an accredited degree, the Fundamentals of Engineering examination, four years of qualifying experience and the Principles and Practice examination. Controls, product, test and manufacturing electrical engineering generally do not require it. Since the licensed side of the discipline is where local demand is strongest, the licence has more value in this metro than the national picture would suggest.

SOC 17-2071 covers the engineer designing a substation and the engineer designing an integrated circuit. Those are different labour markets with different pay levels, and a metro's published median depends heavily on which of them it hosts. Chicago is overwhelmingly the first kind. So a below-national median here is not evidence that electrical engineers are underpaid in this region relative to comparable work elsewhere — it is evidence that the region does a different kind of electrical engineering. The right comparison for someone in power or building systems is against other infrastructure metros, not against the national aggregate.

Electricity demand in this region is rising after two decades of flatness, driven by data centres, electrification of heating and transport, and industrial load. Meeting it requires substation capacity, transmission upgrades, interconnection studies and protection engineering — all specialisms with long training times and a workforce that skewed old after years of low investment. The result locally is a seller's market for power systems engineers that the 7.2% national growth projection does not capture. For an engineer choosing a specialism in this metro, power is currently the clearest answer.

In technology-hardware electrical engineering the PE licence is nearly irrelevant, which is why the discipline as a whole has a reputation for licensure being optional. In an infrastructure market it is the opposite: sealed design is the work. Because Chicago's electrical engineering base is buildings, utilities and public infrastructure, the licence is a genuine gate to the upper half of this band rather than a credential to consider later. Engineers arriving from a product background frequently underestimate this and find their progression stalls at senior-engineer level without it.