Packaging Engineer Salary 2026,
What Packaging Engineers Actually Earn

How much do packaging engineers make in 2026?

Packaging engineers are read here against the BLS engineers, all other series: OEWS May 2025 gives the SOC 17-2199 national median as $122,930 a year ($59.10 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $66,810 and the top 10% at $189,950. The caveat matters: this is a residual code collecting engineering specialisms without their own classification, including a substantial number of higher-paid engineers in federal, aerospace and energy roles. Packaging engineering typically sits below that midpoint, often between the 10th and 50th percentile, with senior and technically specialised roles reaching and exceeding it. The discipline itself is broader than it sounds. Packaging engineers design primary, secondary and transit packaging that protects product, works on high-speed filling and packing lines, meets regulatory and labelling requirements, survives distribution testing, and increasingly meets sustainability targets and extended producer responsibility rules. Pay follows two levers. Regulated packaging — pharmaceutical, medical device and food contact — pays above general consumer goods because material qualification, sterile barrier integrity and regulatory documentation apply. Sustainability capability is the second and fastest growing: recyclability requirements, plastic reduction targets and packaging regulation have created genuine demand for engineers who can redesign a package without losing shelf life or line performance. Employment is projected to grow 2.1% through 2034 with roughly 9,300 openings a year. → Full packaging engineer career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $122,930 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 17-2199, 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.

Full site methodology & data sources →