Project Engineer Salary 2026,
What Project Engineers Actually Earn

How much do project engineers make in 2026?

Project engineer is one of the least standardised titles in the profession, and BLS has no code for it, so the wage row here is the residual series, engineers, all other: OEWS May 2025 puts SOC 17-2199 at a national median of $122,930 a year ($59.10 an hour), with a P10 of $66,810 and a P90 of $189,950. Treat that as a bracket, not a measurement — and be aware that in construction and contracting, project engineer is frequently an early-career role that would sit well below this median, while in process industries and capital projects it is a mid-to-senior role that sits at or above it. That ambiguity is the single most important thing to establish about any project engineer job posting. What the role consistently involves is the interface between engineering and delivery: turning a design into something that gets built or manufactured on schedule and on budget, coordinating disciplines, managing suppliers and contractors, and owning the technical issues that surface during execution. Engineers who are strong at that interface tend to progress toward project management or construction management, where compensation is set by project value rather than by engineering grade. Employment is projected to grow 2.1% through 2034 with roughly 9,300 openings a year. → Full project 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 →