Materials Engineers
What the pay figures show
- For once the obvious answer is right. New Mexico pays materials engineers best, at $165,600. It keeps that lead after tax. It keeps it after local prices too — $130,186 in comparable money. Most jobs are not this tidy.
- The nominal leader for materials engineers is also the real leader: New Mexico at $165,600, holding through tax and through price deflation to $130,186. 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
$112,860
People doing it
22,770
Highest paid
$165,600
NM
Best off, really
$130,186
NM, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$72,300
Highest tenth
$175,720
Lowest, really
$58,570
IA
States with data
45
National average
$120,250
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
90.39%
NM, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job roughly doubles depending on the state. That is a lot. Some of it is prices, because dear places pay more to make up for costing more. Most of it is not. In real money the range is still $58,570 to $130,186.
- This is a small job: about 22,770 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 45 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $112,860. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, New Mexico pays most.
- Interstate variation in materials engineers pay approaches twofold nominally. The standard explanation — that high-wage states are merely high-cost states — is only partly supported here: after tax and price adjustment the range remains $58,570 to $130,186, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 22,770 workers, materials engineers is among the smaller occupations BLS publishes. Treat single-state figures as indicative rather than precise; suppression and sampling error both bite harder at this scale.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for materials engineers in 45 jurisdictions, short of the full set. ⚠️ Absence reflects estimate suppression — small samples or disclosure rules — rather than absence of employment, so the state comparison above is over the published subset.
Pay band: Materials Engineers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $72,300 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $112,860 |
| Top tenth earn over | $175,720 |
| This salary | $112,860 |
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 Materials Engineers
The national median for this job
$112,860around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $72,300 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $112,860 |
| Top tenth | $175,720 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Materials Engineers, state by state
The national median for this job
45states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Iowa · $64,270 |
|---|---|
| Highest | New Mexico · $165,600 |
| Spread | $101,330 |
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 | $117,700 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $121,122 |
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 | $165,600 | $117,670 | $130,186 |
| LA | $128,670 | $95,738 | $108,368 |
| WA | $139,840 | $106,847 | $98,420 |
| MD | $140,640 | $100,843 | $96,997 |
| WY | $110,970 | $86,897 | $95,651 |
| SC | $121,610 | $89,013 | $95,531 |
| TX | $117,700 | $91,632 | $94,296 |
| DE | $131,320 | $93,587 | $94,291 |
| AK | $123,360 | $95,583 | $93,971 |
| IL | $126,620 | $91,688 | $92,750 |
| AR | $103,900 | $78,538 | $90,787 |
| CO | $124,030 | $91,292 | $90,047 |
| FL | $118,780 | $92,392 | $89,309 |
| AL | $107,580 | $80,040 | $88,963 |
| OH | $106,510 | $81,547 | $88,820 |
| ID | $105,820 | $78,519 | $85,884 |
| CT | $122,300 | $88,770 | $85,612 |
| OK | $99,950 | $75,148 | $85,118 |
| VA | $116,720 | $84,992 | $84,360 |
| NY | $125,900 | $90,723 | $84,295 |
| KY | $100,620 | $76,212 | $84,242 |
| IN | $101,120 | $77,014 | $83,544 |
| NC | $104,240 | $78,512 | $83,400 |
| KS | $100,000 | $73,889 | $82,130 |
| NE | $98,270 | $74,195 | $82,096 |
| MO | $98,860 | $74,669 | $81,372 |
| OR | $122,850 | $85,035 | $81,201 |
| CA | $128,470 | $91,220 | $81,026 |
| NV | $99,010 | $78,484 | $80,928 |
| AZ | $106,810 | $81,703 | $80,810 |
| TN | $91,940 | $73,510 | $79,457 |
| MN | $106,220 | $77,856 | $79,108 |
| GA | $100,840 | $75,338 | $77,910 |
| WI | $96,210 | $72,257 | $77,615 |
| MA | $114,100 | $83,714 | $77,343 |
| PA | $98,030 | $74,785 | $76,702 |
| NH | $101,290 | $80,088 | $76,024 |
| MI | $94,050 | $71,248 | $75,647 |
| ME | $97,110 | $71,846 | $73,994 |
| NJ | $106,920 | $79,427 | $72,947 |
| UT | $88,080 | $66,875 | $70,393 |
| MS | $78,700 | $61,139 | $70,040 |
| RI | $87,180 | $67,312 | $66,375 |
| MT | $76,030 | $59,382 | $65,802 |
| IA | $64,270 | $51,990 | $58,570 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of materials engineers earn less than the figures here and half earn more, and experience, employer and city move an individual a long way from the middle. Nationally the middle earns $112,860.
- One filer, no dependants, nothing paid into a pension before tax — that is the household behind every take-home figure for materials engineers. It is the simplest case on purpose, so the states can be compared against each other rather than against each other's family circumstances. City income taxes are not counted. On that household, New Mexico keeps the most at $117,670.
- The price adjustment for materials 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 — Iowa anchors the bottom at $58,570. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for materials engineers, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $112,860, with half of workers below it; dispersion within a state routinely exceeds the dispersion between states, driven by tenure, employer size, sector and metropolitan area. An individual's position in the distribution is not predictable from geography alone.
- The household modeled for materials engineers is a single filer, standard deduction, no dependants, no pre-tax contributions. Holding the household constant is what makes the interstate comparison meaningful; it also means the absolute figures overstate liability for most real filers. On that basis New Mexico retains the most, $117,670. Municipal and school-district income taxes are not included in any state.
- Real-terms figures for materials 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.