Mechanical Engineer Salary in Texas 2026,
$112,410 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Texas figure is $112,410 a year, or $54.05 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $75,810 at the 10th percentile to $175,210 at the 90th and quartiles at $91,420 and $145,090. That is 8.0% above the national median of $104,110, and Texas levies no personal income tax on top of that. The row is SOC 17-2141, an exact match.

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands at $125,350, then Midland $125,200, Corpus Christi $124,340, Beaumont-Port Arthur $122,280 and Odessa $111,700. Four of the five are energy markets — refining, petrochemical, upstream and LNG — and Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington does not appear in the top five. Mechanical engineering in Texas is priced by the process industries.

Not for most industrial roles. The Texas Board of Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors licenses professional engineers, and the licence is required to offer engineering services to the public, to seal documents and for public agency work. Engineering performed in-house for an operating company's own facilities generally does not require it. Texas is stricter than many states about the use of the engineering title, though, so the licence has value beyond its strict legal necessity.

The location quotient of 0.82 across 22,080 jobs says exactly that, and it is genuinely surprising for a state with this much industrial capacity. The most consistent reading is that Texas's mechanical engineering employment is concentrated in high-value process and energy applications rather than spread across general manufacturing, which employs mechanical engineers in large numbers in the industrial midwest. Fewer engineers doing more specialised work is also consistent with the 8.0% wage premium.

It is the best-paying one on the published data, but not the only one. Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands $125,350, Corpus Christi $124,340 and Beaumont-Port Arthur $122,280 are refining, petrochemical and LNG markets; Midland $125,200 and Odessa $111,700 are upstream. Central Texas semiconductor and advanced manufacturing investment is a separate and growing source of mechanical engineering demand that does not appear in this metro table but is real. A candidate should treat Texas as several distinct markets rather than one.

It means the specialisms that pay are process and equipment ones. Rotating equipment — pumps, compressors, turbines — pressure vessel and piping integrity, heat transfer, and reliability engineering are the disciplines that Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands at $125,350 and Beaumont-Port Arthur at $122,280 are paying for. A mechanical engineer whose background is in product design or general manufacturing will find the Texas premium harder to access, because the state's 0.82 location quotient reflects a workforce that is smaller and more specialised than the national norm rather than a broadly distributed one. The upside is that those specialisms are durable and are currently being extended by liquefied natural gas, hydrogen and carbon capture project work in the same corridor.

At graduation, and in favour of taking the Fundamentals of Engineering examination. The professional engineer licence itself is optional for most industrial mechanical engineering in Texas, so a candidate can reasonably defer the Principles and Practice examination. But the Fundamentals examination is far easier immediately after an accredited degree than years later, it costs little, and it preserves the option. Given that Texas regulates the engineering title more tightly than many states and that consulting and public agency work both require the full licence, the option is worth holding even for someone who expects to spend a career inside an operating company.

Favourably against everything except Wyoming. Wyoming publishes $117,750 with no income tax either, so it genuinely leads. Rhode Island $116,230, New Jersey $112,300 and Vermont $107,330 all apply state income tax to figures at or below Texas's $112,410, so Texas leads them net by more than the gross ordering shows. Washington at $110,430 has no income tax and sits below Texas. The qualification is property tax, which in Texas is among the highest in the country — but Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands and the other energy metros are cheap to buy in relative to the coastal markets that compete for these engineers, so the overall position remains strong.