Quality Engineer Salary 2026,
What Quality Engineers Actually Earn

How much do quality engineers make in 2026?

Quality engineers are counted here against the BLS industrial engineers series: OEWS May 2025 gives the SOC 17-2112 national median as $102,440 a year ($49.25 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $74,370 and the top 10% at $159,860. Quality engineering sits around and somewhat below that midpoint in general manufacturing and above it in regulated and automotive supply settings, and the reason is the technical toolkit the role is expected to hold. A quality engineer applies engineering method to quality problems: failure mode and effects analysis, control plans, measurement system analysis, process capability studies, structured root cause investigation, statistical sampling and design of experiments. In automotive supply that toolkit is formalised through advanced product quality planning and the production part approval process, which customers require and audit. In medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturing it extends into design controls, risk management and validation. Those formal frameworks are what separate quality engineering pay from inspection supervision, because they require training that takes years and carry customer or regulatory consequence when done badly. Progression runs into quality management, supplier quality leadership or, frequently, into process and manufacturing engineering, since the analytical skills transfer directly. Employment is projected to grow 11% through 2034 with roughly 25,200 openings a year. → Full quality 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.

Full site methodology & data sources →