Architectural and Engineering Managers
What the pay figures show
- For once the obvious answer is right. New Mexico pays this job best, at $215,120. It keeps that lead after tax. It keeps it after local prices too — $166,899 in comparable money. Most jobs are not this tidy.
- The nominal leader for architectural and engineering managers is also the real leader: New Mexico at $215,120, holding through tax and through price deflation to $166,899. Both adjustments leave the ordering at the top intact, which indicates a wage premium large enough to dominate the state's tax burden and price level rather than merely offset them.
Compare this career across states
Choose your filing status and local taxes, compare pay, and keep a shortlist.Compare wage and personal-pay outcomes by state, with selected resident local taxes and saved career choices.
Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$171,270
People doing it
220,260
Highest paid
$215,120
NM
Best off, really
$166,899
NM, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$120,810
Highest tenth
$262,760
Lowest, really
$96,476
HI
States with data
51
National average
$181,540
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
90.39%
NM, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- The state you work in changes what this job pays, but less than you would expect. Level out tax and prices and the whole country sits between $96,476 and $166,899. That is a real difference. It is not usually a moving-house difference.
- 220,260 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $171,270. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- Coverage is complete — all 51 jurisdictions publish this, on a middle wage of $171,270. Nothing is missing.
- Interstate variation for architectural and engineering managers is contained relative to other occupations, and narrows further under adjustment: the real range is $96,476 to $166,899. A differential of this magnitude is real but rarely decisive on its own, which is worth stating plainly against wage tables that present nominal gaps without either adjustment.
- National employment in architectural and engineering managers is 220,260 — a substantial occupation, though an order of magnitude below the largest. Regional differentials here move real aggregate sums without dominating any single state's wage bill.
- Coverage for architectural and engineering managers is complete at 51 jurisdictions. No suppression applies, so the highest and lowest figures above are genuinely the national extremes.
Pay band: Architectural and Engineering Managers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $120,810 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $171,270 |
| Top tenth earn over | $262,760 |
| This salary | $171,270 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in Architectural and Engineering Managers
The national median for this job
$171,270around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $120,810 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $171,270 |
| Top tenth | $262,760 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Architectural and Engineering Managers, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $140,600 |
|---|---|
| Highest | New Mexico · $215,120 |
| Spread | $74,520 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $171,370 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $176,352 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| NM | $215,120 | $150,853 | $166,899 |
| SD | $164,330 | $123,586 | $140,287 |
| WY | $163,560 | $123,059 | $135,456 |
| LA | $162,850 | $118,075 | $133,652 |
| OH | $166,870 | $121,449 | $132,280 |
| TX | $171,370 | $128,397 | $132,130 |
| TN | $161,430 | $121,603 | $131,442 |
| WA | $189,680 | $141,233 | $130,095 |
| MA | $201,430 | $140,229 | $129,556 |
| AL | $162,350 | $115,665 | $128,559 |
| CO | $183,810 | $129,521 | $127,755 |
| SC | $169,040 | $118,964 | $127,675 |
| NC | $167,840 | $119,797 | $127,255 |
| OK | $157,330 | $112,222 | $127,112 |
| MI | $166,930 | $118,519 | $125,838 |
| ID | $162,970 | $114,872 | $125,646 |
| NV | $161,560 | $121,692 | $125,482 |
| DE | $181,190 | $124,382 | $125,318 |
| CA | $210,280 | $141,034 | $125,274 |
| ND | $147,400 | $110,399 | $124,643 |
| KS | $160,150 | $112,081 | $124,583 |
| FL | $170,740 | $127,967 | $123,697 |
| IN | $155,810 | $113,195 | $122,793 |
| RI | $175,910 | $124,497 | $122,764 |
| MO | $157,800 | $112,643 | $122,756 |
| NH | $172,240 | $128,992 | $122,447 |
| PA | $164,690 | $118,776 | $121,821 |
| AK | $164,260 | $123,538 | $121,455 |
| VA | $176,160 | $122,303 | $121,394 |
| AZ | $167,480 | $121,954 | $120,621 |
| IA | $147,320 | $106,973 | $120,510 |
| UT | $161,120 | $114,222 | $120,231 |
| MN | $172,130 | $118,238 | $120,140 |
| WV | $149,430 | $107,447 | $119,688 |
| AR | $140,600 | $102,622 | $118,628 |
| KY | $147,680 | $107,154 | $118,444 |
| MS | $142,790 | $103,243 | $118,274 |
| GA | $161,470 | $114,172 | $118,070 |
| CT | $175,490 | $121,934 | $117,596 |
| IL | $163,610 | $115,140 | $116,473 |
| MD | $172,670 | $120,963 | $116,350 |
| MT | $146,030 | $104,188 | $115,451 |
| NJ | $180,640 | $125,417 | $115,185 |
| VT | $157,710 | $110,459 | $114,305 |
| DC | $185,220 | $125,133 | $112,932 |
| NY | $175,710 | $121,469 | $112,862 |
| NE | $141,020 | $101,940 | $112,796 |
| OR | $177,190 | $116,853 | $111,585 |
| WI | $142,060 | $101,421 | $108,942 |
| ME | $145,720 | $102,089 | $105,141 |
| HI | $151,670 | $104,782 | $96,476 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for this job, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $171,270 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- Take-home figures for this job assume one person filing alone, with no dependants and nothing going into a pension before tax. Any of those lowers the tax and raises what you keep, so treat these as the plain case rather than your case. Local city income taxes are not included either, and in a few states those matter. In New Mexico, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $150,853.
- The price adjustment for this job uses a statewide figure, and states are not uniform. A city and a rural county in the same state can differ more from each other than two states do, so treat the real-terms comparison as a direction rather than a precise answer — Hawaii anchors the bottom at $96,476. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- All wage figures for architectural and engineering managers are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $171,270. Within-state dispersion typically exceeds between-state dispersion in this data, so an individual's expected wage is determined more by experience, sector and employer than by the state comparisons presented here.
- Take-home calculations for architectural and engineering managers assume a single filer with no dependants, the standard deduction, and no pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions. Each omitted item reduces taxable income, so the figures function as a lower bound on retained pay for this household shape; the highest such figure is $150,853, in New Mexico. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- Real-terms figures for architectural and engineering managers deflate take-home by a statewide regional price parity, which conceals substantial intra-state variation — metropolitan and non-metropolitan price levels within one state frequently differ by more than two states differ from each other. The wage and price series also carry different reference periods, as each is published on its own schedule, so the adjustment is directionally sound rather than precisely dated.