Manufacturing Engineer Salary 2026,
What Manufacturing Engineers Actually Earn

How much do manufacturing engineers make in 2026?

Manufacturing engineers are counted in the BLS industrial engineers series: OEWS May 2025 puts the SOC 17-2112 national median at $102,440 a year ($49.25 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $74,370 and the top 10% at $159,860. Manufacturing engineering sits around that midpoint, and it is a distinct discipline from the broader industrial engineering that shares the code. Where industrial engineering analyses systems, manufacturing engineering owns how the product is actually made: process definition and routings, fixture and tooling design, machine and equipment selection and commissioning, process capability and validation, new product introduction from design to production, and the resolution of the manufacturing problems that stop a line. That places the role between design engineering and production, which is exactly where its value lies — an engineer who can tell a designer that a feature cannot be manufactured economically saves more than any efficiency project. Pay follows process depth and sector. Precision machining, additive manufacturing, semiconductor and medical device process engineering sit above general fabrication and assembly, and engineers who own automation cell design and commissioning are consistently in demand. New product introduction experience is the other clear differentiator, since taking a design into stable volume production is where most manufacturing programmes actually fail. Employment is projected to grow 11% through 2034 with roughly 25,200 openings a year. → Full manufacturing 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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