Industrial Engineer Salary 2026,
What Industrial Engineers Actually Earn

How much do industrial engineers make in 2026?

Industrial engineers have their own BLS wage series: OEWS May 2025 gives the SOC 17-2112 national median as $102,440 a year ($49.25 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $74,370 and the top 10% at $159,860. This is a clean figure requiring no pooling adjustment, which is unusual and useful. The discipline is about making systems work better — process design and layout, capacity and line balancing, work measurement, materials flow, automation justification, ergonomics and cost reduction — and it applies well beyond factories, which is part of why the band is comparatively high and the growth rate strong. Industry sets the base level: semiconductor, aerospace, pharmaceutical and technology employers pay above general manufacturing, and industrial engineers working in logistics, healthcare systems and technology operations have pulled the upper end of this series upward over the past decade. Position within the band follows analytical depth and the size of decisions influenced. Engineers running time studies and layout improvements sit in the lower half; engineers modelling capacity, justifying capital and designing operating systems sit above the median; and engineers leading manufacturing strategy or operations analytics sit near the top. The discipline also has an unusually clear route into operations management, which is where many industrial engineers ultimately go. Employment is projected to grow 11% through 2034 with roughly 25,200 openings a year. → Full industrial engineer career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $102,440 blends every experience level and every setting in this occupation. For pay by level alone, see Pay by Level below.

Published (BLS): BLS OEWS May 2025, SOC 17-2112, United States national estimate. Public, methodologically rigorous, but sampled on a rolling 3-year basis and published ~10 months after collection — so it reflects wages that are already 1–2 years old by the time you read them.

Level and certification medians: distributed across the published BLS percentile range for this SOC code (P10 through P90) according to the credential tiers this occupation actually hires at. They are modeled reference points, not separately surveyed wages.

State and metro figures: modeled — the BLS national median multiplied by the GlobalCybers state wage index, and for metros by the published metro index for that state. They are estimates of local pay, not BLS state or metropolitan-area observations, and are labelled as modeled in the tables below.

No verified placement sample:GlobalCybers does not yet publish a placement median for this role, so no "verified" figure appears anywhere on this page.

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