Petroleum Engineer Salary in Texas 2026,
$164,860 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Texas figure is $164,860 a year, or $79.26 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $89,990 at the 10th percentile to $283,500 at the 90th and quartiles at $123,450 and $220,330. That is 13.8% above the national median of $144,910, and Texas levies no personal income tax on it. The row is SOC 17-2171, an exact match to the occupation.

Midland at $172,070, then Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands $169,870, Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos $168,860, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington $168,600 and Beaumont-Port Arthur $167,600. The spread is under three percent, which means this is effectively one statewide labour market. Midland is the Permian operational centre and Houston the corporate and technical one, but the same skills command the same price in both.

Usually not. The Texas Board of Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors licenses professional engineers, but engineering performed for an operating or service company on its own wells and facilities generally does not require it. What governs the work is the Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates permitting, well construction, plugging, production reporting and waste disposal. The professional engineer licence matters most in consulting practice and in reserve certification, where third parties rely on the evaluator's opinion.

Very. The occupation's compensation includes bonus and incentive components tied to company performance and, through that, to commodity prices — which is a large part of why the band runs from $164,860 at the median to $283,500 at the 90th percentile. Hiring is more cyclical still: graduate intake contracts sharply in downturns and the $89,990 tenth percentile reflects periods when entry roles are scarce. The pro-rated figure of about 610 openings a year is an average across a cycle, not a steady annual flow.

It is broadening rather than simply declining. Reservoir characterisation, drilling and completion engineering, and subsurface fluid flow modelling are the core skills, and they transfer directly into carbon capture and storage, geothermal energy and subsurface hydrogen storage — all of which are being developed in the same Texas corridors by many of the same companies. A petroleum engineer entering the field now should expect the industry to look different in twenty years but should not assume the skills become obsolete. Texas's 5.60 location quotient means whatever happens to the profession happens here first.

That Texas employs petroleum engineers at more than five and a half times the national rate relative to its total employment. No other occupation in this unit comes close, and few anywhere on this site do. The practical implication is that Texas is not a regional market for this occupation — it is the market. When Texas's median is $164,860 and Utah's is $172,840 on a far smaller workforce, the Utah figure is a local variation and the Texas figure is the national benchmark with an in-state premium attached. It also means concentration risk is unusually high: an engineer in this field in Texas is exposed to a single industry in a single state, without the geographic diversification that a mechanical or civil engineer has.

Because the industry operates as one integrated organisation across the state. Midland at $172,070 is where the Permian assets are operated from; Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands at $169,870 holds corporate technical centres, service companies and the majority of the discipline expertise; Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington at $168,600 and Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos at $168,860 hold headquarters, finance and increasingly data-focused subsurface functions. People and work move between them within the same companies, so wages equalise. The under-three-percent spread means a petroleum engineer choosing a Texas city is choosing lifestyle and cost of living rather than pay — and Midland's housing costs are very different from Austin's.

As a combination of seniority and incentive structure. The step from the $164,860 median to the $220,330 seventy-fifth percentile is technical authority over an asset with capital allocation input and reserve responsibility, which is a genuine promotion. But layered on top is a compensation structure in which annual bonus and longer-term incentives are tied to company results, and in a commodity industry those results vary sharply. OEWS counts realised wages including bonuses, so the $283,500 ninetieth percentile partly reflects good years rather than only senior roles. An engineer benchmarking an offer should separate the base from the variable and compare the base against the middle of the band.