Transportation Engineer Salary 2026,
What Transportation Engineers Actually Earn

How much do transportation engineers make in 2026?

Transportation engineering has no separate BLS occupation, so the wage row here is the civil engineer series: OEWS May 2025 gives the SOC 17-2051 national median as $100,840 a year ($48.48 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $68,240 and the top 10% at $163,220. That covers all 367,840 civil engineers, so transportation practitioners are pooled with land development, municipal, water and geotechnical engineers rather than measured on their own. Within the pool, transportation sits close to the middle, and the reason is who pays for the work. Most of it is publicly funded, through state departments of transportation, metropolitan planning organisations and transit authorities, which means fee structures and salary bands are comparatively disciplined and the boom-and-bust of private development is absent. Engineers split between agency employment — lower base, defined-benefit pension in many states, strong stability — and consulting, which pays more cash and carries utilisation pressure. The PE licence is a hard requirement for design responsibility, and specialism raises the ceiling: traffic operations and signal design, transit and rail systems, and structures work on transportation programmes all pay above general roadway design. Employment is projected to grow 5.0% through 2034 with roughly 23,600 openings a year. → Full transportation engineer career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $100,840 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 17-2051, 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 →