Industrial Engineers
What the pay figures show
- Alaska pays industrial engineers the most, at $156,510. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $116,247 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- Alaska leads for industrial engineers at $156,510 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $116,247 in price-deflated terms. That robustness is the minority case: across the largest occupations, state income tax reorders the leader roughly a third of the time and price level does so more often still. Where the nominal leader survives both, the wage premium is large enough to absorb the state's own tax and price levels.
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
$102,440
People doing it
365,740
Highest paid
$156,510
AK
Best off, really
$116,247
AK, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$74,370
Highest tenth
$159,860
Lowest, really
$68,309
DC
States with data
51
National average
$109,900
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
101.72%
AK, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Nationally, this job pays within a fairly narrow band. Adjust for tax and for local prices and the band tightens again, to between $68,309 and $116,247. Geography is not the main lever on pay here.
- About 365,740 Americans work in this job, on a middle wage of $102,440. Big enough that where you live changes the arithmetic.
- No gaps here — all 51 jurisdictions publish a number for this job, which sits at $102,440 in the middle.
- Wages for industrial engineers cluster comparatively tightly across states, and the clustering strengthens after tax and price deflation — a real range of $68,309 to $116,247. Occupation-level factors such as specialisation and employer type therefore explain more of an individual's pay here than location does.
- With 365,740 workers, industrial engineers sits in the middle of the BLS headcount distribution. The state-level spread described above therefore applies to a meaningful population rather than a niche one.
- 51 jurisdictions report industrial engineers, giving full coverage. The extremes quoted above are therefore the true reported maximum and minimum.
Pay band: Industrial Engineers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $74,370 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $102,440 |
| Top tenth earn over | $159,860 |
| This salary | $102,440 |
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 Industrial Engineers
The national median for this job
$102,440around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $74,370 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $102,440 |
| Top tenth | $159,860 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Industrial Engineers, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | South Dakota · $93,200 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Alaska · $156,510 |
| Spread | $63,310 |
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 | $104,560 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $107,600 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| AK | $156,510 | $118,241 | $116,247 |
| WY | $122,070 | $94,701 | $104,241 |
| LA | $122,920 | $91,980 | $104,115 |
| NM | $128,090 | $93,870 | $103,855 |
| WA | $129,050 | $99,472 | $91,627 |
| WV | $108,360 | $80,987 | $90,215 |
| DE | $120,190 | $86,682 | $87,335 |
| AR | $98,410 | $74,879 | $86,557 |
| ND | $96,940 | $76,396 | $86,253 |
| MT | $104,430 | $77,757 | $86,163 |
| TN | $99,080 | $78,533 | $84,887 |
| TX | $104,560 | $82,388 | $84,783 |
| SD | $93,200 | $74,396 | $84,450 |
| MD | $119,930 | $87,754 | $84,407 |
| OR | $128,290 | $88,271 | $84,291 |
| OH | $100,060 | $77,187 | $84,071 |
| IA | $97,690 | $74,454 | $83,876 |
| OK | $97,510 | $73,541 | $83,298 |
| AL | $99,880 | $74,924 | $83,276 |
| NV | $102,090 | $80,650 | $83,162 |
| MS | $95,830 | $72,505 | $83,061 |
| ID | $100,840 | $75,280 | $82,340 |
| NE | $98,170 | $74,129 | $82,023 |
| KS | $99,830 | $73,778 | $82,008 |
| AZ | $108,280 | $82,700 | $81,797 |
| MO | $99,290 | $74,951 | $81,680 |
| KY | $96,820 | $73,672 | $81,434 |
| UT | $103,940 | $77,326 | $81,395 |
| SC | $101,060 | $75,626 | $81,164 |
| MI | $101,680 | $76,291 | $81,002 |
| HI | $123,800 | $87,918 | $80,949 |
| IN | $97,480 | $74,561 | $80,883 |
| CO | $109,750 | $81,919 | $80,802 |
| RI | $109,350 | $81,916 | $80,776 |
| NC | $99,310 | $75,241 | $79,925 |
| VT | $103,010 | $76,609 | $79,277 |
| CA | $124,600 | $88,934 | $78,996 |
| WI | $96,980 | $72,753 | $78,148 |
| PA | $99,560 | $75,814 | $77,758 |
| FL | $101,610 | $80,313 | $77,633 |
| GA | $100,100 | $74,854 | $77,409 |
| MN | $102,660 | $75,594 | $76,810 |
| ME | $101,030 | $74,323 | $76,545 |
| NH | $101,310 | $80,102 | $76,037 |
| IL | $100,540 | $74,728 | $75,593 |
| VA | $102,550 | $75,838 | $75,274 |
| MA | $109,420 | $80,656 | $74,517 |
| CT | $104,160 | $77,107 | $74,364 |
| NJ | $103,840 | $77,457 | $71,138 |
| NY | $102,640 | $76,022 | $70,635 |
| DC | $103,300 | $75,690 | $68,309 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for industrial engineers, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $102,440 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- The take-home numbers here use the simplest possible household: one filer for industrial engineers, no children, no pension contributions, standard deduction. Real life usually reduces the tax bill below this. City and school-district income taxes are left out, and in Ohio or Pennsylvania that is a real omission. The best after-tax state here is Alaska, at $118,241.
- The price adjustment for industrial engineers 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 — the District of Columbia anchors the bottom at $68,309. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- All wage figures for industrial engineers are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $102,440. 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.
- Retained-pay figures for industrial engineers model a single filer taking the standard deduction with no dependants and no pre-tax deferrals — deliberately the simplest household, so the comparison across states isolates geography rather than personal circumstances. Local income taxes are outside the model; Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland residents should expect a meaningfully lower figure than $118,241, which leads in Alaska.
- Real-terms figures for industrial engineers 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.