Electrical Engineer Salary in New York 2026,
$119,010 Median | BLS Data by City

New York electrical engineers earn a median $119,010 a year, $57.22 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with the middle half between $91,580 and $144,250 and a full range of $74,870 to $168,820. That is 1.3% below the $120,630 national median, before New York's state and city taxes.

New York-Newark-Jersey City at $128,340, then Binghamton at $126,010, Kiryas Joel-Poughkeepsie-Newburgh at $124,630, Syracuse at $111,070 and Rochester at $108,160. Binghamton coming within two and a half thousand dollars of the metropolitan area is the notable result — its defence electronics and instrumentation base needs specialised engineers and cannot draw on a deep local pool.

Not to work as an employed engineer. The New York State Education Department's Office of the Professions licenses professional engineers, and the licence is required to offer engineering services to the public and to seal drawings — which matters a great deal in building services, utility and infrastructure design, and hardly at all in manufacturing or product engineering. In the New York City building market, a PE is close to essential for senior roles.

State rates run from 4% to 10.9% progressively, and residents of the five boroughs pay an additional city income tax of roughly 3.078% to 3.876%. At the median of $119,010 the residency decision is worth several thousand dollars a year. Employees also fund Paid Family Leave at 0.432% of wages in 2026, capped at $411.91, plus statutory disability coverage.

Three things. New York City's emissions requirements for large buildings are generating a substantial retrofit and electrification workload requiring sealed electrical design. Grid modernisation and offshore wind interconnection are creating utility and transmission engineering demand. And semiconductor investment in the Capital Region and central New York, alongside the established defence electronics base around Binghamton, is drawing engineers upstate — which is why Binghamton at $126,010 pays close to city rates.

Because the state's economy is weighted toward finance, healthcare, media and services rather than the manufacturing and product engineering sectors that employ electrical engineers in volume. New York's electrical engineering employment concentrates in building services consulting, utilities, defence electronics upstate and a growing but still modest semiconductor presence. A location quotient of 0.71 across about 8,770 engineers reflects that composition rather than any shortage of demand within the sectors that do employ them.

The state median of $119,010 blends two markets with very different cost structures. A New York City building services engineer at $128,340 faces housing and city tax costs that an upstate engineer at $108,160 in Rochester does not, and in real terms the upstate figure may well go further. The band also spans consulting, utility and manufacturing work with quite different progression paths — the $168,820 ninetieth percentile is principal and firm-principal territory, not a senior staff rate.

In building services and infrastructure, decisively. Any electrical design filed for a New York City building permit must be sealed by a licensed professional engineer, which makes the PE the gateway to senior consulting roles and to firm ownership in the largest construction market in the country. Outside that — in manufacturing, defence electronics, semiconductors and product engineering — it carries little weight and few engineers pursue it. Knowing which side of that line your career sits on is the single most useful planning decision for a New York electrical engineer.