Mechanical Drafters
What the pay figures show
- New Mexico pays mechanical drafters the most, at $89,940. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $76,369 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- New Mexico leads for mechanical drafters at $89,940 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $76,369 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
$71,550
People doing it
39,960
Highest paid
$89,940
NM
Best off, really
$76,369
NM, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$48,360
Highest tenth
$106,580
Lowest, really
$44,317
NH
States with data
47
National average
$75,060
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 is fairly steady around the country. Count tax and local prices and the states bunch closer still, from $44,317 to $76,369. For work like this, where you live changes your life more than it changes your pay.
- Just 39,960 Americans work in this job. Small fields move around more from year to year.
- Some states are missing here. There are figures for 47 jurisdictions, averaging $71,550 in the middle. A blank means nobody published a number, not that the job pays nothing there. New Mexico leads the published set.
- Geographic dispersion in mechanical drafters is moderate by national standards. Tax and price adjustment compress the distribution further, to a real range of $44,317 through $76,369. Where nominal spread is this contained, relocation decisions in the occupation turn on non-wage factors, because the wage differential does not survive the adjustments in a form large enough to drive them.
- 39,960 are employed nationally in mechanical drafters — a small occupation, where the state spread above is more sensitive to sample composition than it would be in a large one.
- Coverage for mechanical drafters runs to 47 jurisdictions, short of the full set. The omitted states are suppressed at source; treat the spread above as the range across reported states rather than across the country.
Pay band: Mechanical Drafters
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $48,360 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $71,550 |
| Top tenth earn over | $106,580 |
| This salary | $71,550 |
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 Mechanical Drafters
The national median for this job
$71,550around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $48,360 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $71,550 |
| Top tenth | $106,580 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Mechanical Drafters, state by state
The national median for this job
47states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | South Dakota · $52,610 |
|---|---|
| Highest | New Mexico · $89,940 |
| Spread | $37,330 |
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 | $79,380 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $81,688 |
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 | $89,940 | $69,027 | $76,369 |
| ND | $77,570 | $63,147 | $71,295 |
| LA | $77,730 | $61,567 | $69,690 |
| TX | $79,380 | $64,674 | $66,554 |
| CO | $85,280 | $65,781 | $64,884 |
| NV | $75,830 | $62,176 | $64,113 |
| OH | $70,580 | $57,258 | $62,365 |
| KY | $68,880 | $54,994 | $60,788 |
| ME | $76,360 | $58,715 | $60,470 |
| MI | $72,280 | $56,858 | $60,369 |
| VT | $73,040 | $57,503 | $59,506 |
| NJ | $83,380 | $64,366 | $59,115 |
| WV | $65,100 | $52,395 | $58,365 |
| MO | $66,350 | $53,311 | $58,097 |
| WA | $76,820 | $62,873 | $57,914 |
| UT | $70,000 | $54,960 | $57,851 |
| IA | $63,330 | $51,271 | $57,759 |
| MN | $73,090 | $56,802 | $57,716 |
| OK | $63,440 | $50,800 | $57,540 |
| TN | $63,390 | $53,114 | $57,411 |
| MD | $76,740 | $59,535 | $57,265 |
| KS | $65,250 | $51,256 | $56,973 |
| WY | $61,070 | $51,250 | $56,413 |
| CA | $82,510 | $63,294 | $56,221 |
| AR | $59,960 | $48,598 | $56,177 |
| MS | $60,460 | $48,433 | $55,484 |
| SC | $63,740 | $51,485 | $55,255 |
| IN | $62,820 | $50,832 | $55,142 |
| NY | $76,490 | $59,107 | $54,919 |
| WI | $63,770 | $51,088 | $54,876 |
| GA | $66,670 | $53,004 | $54,814 |
| FL | $68,050 | $56,703 | $54,811 |
| RI | $69,290 | $55,397 | $54,626 |
| NE | $61,170 | $49,250 | $54,495 |
| AZ | $67,410 | $54,970 | $54,369 |
| VA | $69,630 | $54,572 | $54,166 |
| MA | $75,490 | $58,483 | $54,032 |
| PA | $63,480 | $51,237 | $52,551 |
| OR | $74,000 | $54,964 | $52,486 |
| CT | $68,830 | $54,216 | $52,287 |
| ID | $59,050 | $47,350 | $51,791 |
| NC | $59,050 | $47,779 | $50,754 |
| IL | $63,320 | $50,068 | $50,648 |
| SD | $52,610 | $44,452 | $50,459 |
| AL | $53,600 | $42,945 | $47,733 |
| DE | $57,110 | $45,465 | $45,807 |
| NH | $55,390 | $46,686 | $44,317 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for mechanical drafters, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $71,550 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 mechanical drafters, 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 New Mexico, at $69,027.
- Levelling out prices for mechanical drafters is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — New Hampshire sits at the bottom on $44,317.
- All wage figures for mechanical drafters are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $71,550. 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 mechanical drafters 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 $69,027, which leads in New Mexico.
- The price deflation applied to mechanical drafters uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is New Hampshire at $44,317. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — New Hampshire anchors the bottom at $44,317 — and the two source series are dated independently.