The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) wage data puts the civil engineer median at $100,840 and the mean at $108,670, with the middle half earning $79,930 to $129,680. New hires average just above $77,000 in the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) 2026 salary report. One number won’t turn those figures into offers your firm’s utilization can support.

Average Civil Engineer Earnings in the US

Civil engineers earned a median of $100,840 a year in the May 2025 wage profile from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey. The same profile puts the mean at $108,670, or $52.24 an hour, across 367,840 employed civil engineers.

ASCE reports a higher number. Its 2026 report puts average base salary at $152,000. The two surveys measure different populations. ASCE polls its members, and BLS surveys employers.

Core pay figures in this guide trace to these releases, current as of October 23, 2026:

Salary Range From Lowest to Highest Paid

Half of all civil engineers earn between $79,930 and $129,680, the 25th and 75th percentiles in the May 2025 OEWS data:

The 10th-to-90th spread is $94,980. The middle half spans $49,750, from the 25th percentile to the 75th. All five values sit well below the $239,200 top-coding threshold.

Civil Engineer Pay Rises With Experience

Civil engineers start near $77,000, and the median primary income across all ASCE respondents, whose typical member has about 20 years of experience, is $136,176. The entry-level, mid-career, and senior subsections put those figures alongside project-engineer and principal pay.

Starting salary for entry-level civil engineers

New civil engineers start at the entry-level median of $77,100 that ASCE reported in 2025. ASCE’s 2026 salary report puts the average entry-level salary just above $77,000.

Mid-career pay for project engineers

The BLS 50th-to-75th percentile band, $100,840 to $129,680, is a reasonable placement for project engineers and newly licensed staff. BLS doesn’t tag its percentiles by experience, so treat this as a suggested placement. Indeed’s senior posting average of $121,170 for senior civil engineers falls inside that band.

Senior and principal-level pay

ASCE’s 2025 report put median primary income at $136,176 across 2,061 member responses, counting salary, commissions, bonuses, and net self-employment income. ASCE’s public summaries don’t publish experience bands or separate engineers in training (EITs) from other early-career staff. The figure covers all respondents, so it isn’t a senior-only benchmark.

Zweig’s most recent public principal figures date from its 2019 survey, which reported a principal median base of $165,000 and median total compensation of $241,875. The gap between those two figures is $76,875. ASCE’s $136,176 median primary income counts salary, commissions, bonuses, and net self-employment income, so it is a different measure from Zweig’s base. Those principal figures predate the 2025 ASCE report, so use them as reference points for principal bands, not as current market rates.

Highest-Paying States and Where the Jobs Are

California pays civil engineers a mean of $124,540, the highest of any state and $15,870 above the national mean. The wage figures below come from BLS state wages. BLS ranks these five as the top-paying states for civil engineers.

Cost of living more than offsets the premium. The cost-adjusted column divides each mean wage by that state’s Q2 2026 cost index from the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center (MERIC), where the U.S. average equals 100:

Above national mean subtracts the $108,670 national mean; cost-adjusted wage divides the mean wage by the MERIC index and multiplies by 100.

After adjustment, all five states fall below the unadjusted $108,670 national mean, and Washington keeps the most purchasing power. MERIC averages city indexes from the Council for Community and Economic Research (C2ER), whose Cost of Living Index is built for professional and managerial households in the top income quintile.

Where civil engineering jobs concentrate

The table below ranks metros by civil engineering employment, drawn from the May 2025 OEWS profile:

Industries and Employers That Pay Civil Engineers Most

The federal government pays civil engineers a median of $117,790 in OEWS industry data, the highest of the industries below. The other three medians come from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH), and every employment count comes from OEWS. Engineering services employ the most civil engineers and pay close to the overall median:

ASCE’s 2026 respondents in private-industry defense roles reported the highest median income, near $169,000. State government respondents reported the lowest salaries. ASCE also reports pay by organization size. Respondents at organizations with more than 10,000 employees reported a $159,000 median primary income, and those at organizations with one to 10 employees reported a $129,000 median salary.

Base pay is only part of the package, and benefits and additional pay vary by employer type.

• Benefits: Across all ASCE respondents, 95.6% of employers offered health insurance in 2026. In 2025, more than 78% of respondents were vested in a retirement plan, and the median paid time off was 20 days.
• Additional pay and overtime: Glassdoor’s pay breakdown puts additional pay at $13K to $25K a year above base. On overtime, covered nonexempt state and local government employees must receive time and a half past 40 hours, or comp time in its place. None of these surveys reports how often consulting engineers receive overtime pay.

Price an offer against that whole package, not base pay alone. A Dewberry human resources director told ASCE that firms tend to see higher profit margins with private clients, and that affects what they can pay. Margin sets the ceiling on pay. Utilization, covered in the next section, is how a firm checks whether its work supports that ceiling.

Highest-Paying Civil Engineering Specialties

Forensic engineering led ASCE’s 2026 lines of business at a median near $184,000. Among the 2026 ASCE rows, structural ranked lowest, at $130,000. The rows draw on ASCE’s 2026 salary report, its 2025 report summary, its 2024 salary report, and the BLS environmental engineers profile. The measures and years vary by row, so rows from different years and measures aren’t directly comparable:

For structural pay specifically, see Monograph’s structural engineer salary guide, which uses the same BLS civil engineers occupation data.

What Firm Utilization and Staffing Cost Let a Firm Pay

Firm owners can offer only what the firm’s revenue supports. Utilization, the share of each engineer’s labor cost charged to billable work, shows how much of a salary the firm’s projects cover. A salary pays for itself only when enough of that labor bills to projects. The Deltek and American Institute of Architects (AIA) benchmarks below show where firms stand.

The 47th Deltek Clarity A&E study put the utilization rate at 58.9% of labor dollars for fiscal 2025, down 2.2 points, with a net labor multiplier of 3.11. In other words, 58.9 cents of each labor dollar went to billable work.

AIA ties these numbers together. Its payroll multiplier formula is utilization times net multiplier, which gives net revenue per dollar of total labor. AIA’s benchmark is 60% to 65% utilization and a payroll multiplier of 1.80 to 1.95.

Run your own project engineer through that formula at the BLS median of $100,840:

The five-point gap costs you $15,700 of revenue capacity on one salary without a single raise. Both rows are calculations from Deltek’s 58.9% utilization and 3.11 net multiplier, not published benchmarks, and they treat the salary as the engineer’s whole labor cost.

Use four inputs to check whether a salary pays for itself:

• Compensation hours: The hours each employee is paid for, which set the denominator for utilization.
• Planned hours by phase: The hours each person is scheduled against each phase of a project budget.
• Billing rates: Rates that cover salary and overhead while allowing for profit.
• Phase burn: Hours used against each phase budget while the work is still open.

Monograph keeps those inputs in one system built for A&E firms. Teams assign planned hours per person per phase within project budgets. Capacity forecasting adds probability-weighted pipeline hours to planned work, then compares that demand with compensation hours so you can see a staffing gap before deciding to hire. Customers see the difference in staffing speed. Workbench reports staffing eight times faster with Monograph. Phase-level project margins show which project types support higher pay bands.

A PE License Carries the Best-Documented Pay Premium

A Professional Engineer (PE) license adds nearly $49,000 in median income over engineers with no license or certification, the PE income premium in ASCE’s 2026 report. ASCE’s 2025 salary survey put the gap near $40,000 and found that 80% of respondents held a PE. ASCE’s public summaries don’t report a PE-versus-EIT or Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) premium, so the published gap compares PEs only with engineers holding no credential.

No current public source breaks out a master’s premium for civil engineers, and ASCE’s public summaries don’t publish a degree split. For pay bands, price the PE license first, because it carries the larger and better-documented premium.

Realistic Top-End Earnings for Civil Engineers

Pay well above the BLS 90th percentile of $163,220 does exist. The latest public figures show where it comes from:

• Owner and principal: Zweig’s 2025 valuation report on architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms describes the median AEC firm as 45 full-time equivalents (FTEs) with six owners. In 2026, the median ownership stake principals bought rose to 25% from 16%, and 87% of principals said their stake was worth more than they paid.
• Expert witness: SEAK’s 2024 survey found all-discipline medians of $450 an hour for case review and $500 for court testimony, billed per engagement, and the survey summary doesn’t publish an engineering-specific median.
• Executive: AECOM’s chief executive officer (CEO) earned a $1.4 million base and a $15.9 million package in 2025. Engineering News-Record found that CEO pay at nine of the largest public design and contracting companies ranged from $2.6 million to $26 million between 2021 and 2024.

Ownership is the only one of the three paths open to most engineers at a small or mid-sized firm. Expert witness work supplements an engineering career and does not replace it. Executive packages exist only at a handful of the largest public design and contracting companies. The realistic top-end path you can offer your senior engineers at your A&E firm is a route to ownership.

Civil Engineer Pay Compared to Other Engineers

Civil engineers earn slightly more than the architecture and engineering group overall, based on May 2025 BLS data. They earn less than mechanical engineers and environmental engineers, with petroleum engineers further ahead, and the civil row comes from the civil engineer profile:

Petroleum engineering is a small occupation, with 18,060 jobs. Petroleum’s $44,070 median gap over civil engineers, calculated from the table, applies to far fewer jobs. Mechanical and environmental engineers sit closer, at $3,270 and $6,270 above the civil median, so they are the realistic comparison when a civil engineer weighs another discipline.

Why Salary Sources Disagree

The sources disagree because each one measures a different population and a different kind of pay:

• BLS: BLS builds its estimates from employer-reported survey data, and it publishes both the $100,840 median and the $108,670 mean.
• ASCE: The $152,000 figure is an average base salary from Society members. The typical respondent in the 2025 report had about 20 years of experience.
• Indeed: Its job posting average of $97,477 comes from 10.6k salaries in postings over 36 months, last updated October 12, 2026.
• Glassdoor: It reports $109K median total pay, base plus additional pay, from 13,679 anonymous employee submissions run through a model.
• ZipRecruiter: It reports an $82,674 average as of August 16, 2026, built from postings and third-party data, and it doesn’t say whether that figure is base or total pay.

Use the BLS median and percentiles to set bands and ASCE to price licensure. Keep Indeed, Glassdoor, and ZipRecruiter in view anyway, because they show the numbers candidates see before your offer reaches them.

Civil Engineer Job Growth Outlook Through 2035

BLS projects 6% employment growth for civil engineers from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all occupations. The same projection round counts 22,700 openings a year. Those two figures frame the hiring market your pay bands compete in.

Hiring is already tight. In the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC) Research Institute’s Q2 2026 survey, 84% of firms had at least one opening, and 83% named finding qualified engineers as their greatest challenge. In ASCE’s 2025 survey, the 6.9% of respondents who changed jobs got a median 20% increase, which is the number your retention plan has to beat.

Set Your Firm’s Civil Engineering Pay Bands Against Real Data

Start by placing each role on the BLS percentile table, then test whether your utilization can support that placement. Work through the steps in this order:

1. Map each title to a percentile band, using the 25th to 75th range for staff and project engineers.
2. Price the PE premium against ASCE’s nearly $49,000 gap.
3. Run each salary through your utilization and net multiplier to confirm the revenue it needs.
4. Check phase-level margins by project type before raising bands across the board.

Monograph keeps pipeline, phase budgets, staffing, timesheets, and billing in one system, which puts the utilization and phase-margin checks above in one place. Book a demo to run those checks against your firm’s project structure.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does a civil engineer make at entry level compared to a senior engineer?

Senior civil engineers earn more than $40,000 above entry-level staff. Indeed’s posted salaries put the gap at $45,253 between entry-level and senior roles. The gap is a spread between two posting averages, not a promotion premium measured on individual engineers.

New graduates start near $77,000 in ASCE’s data. Indeed’s posted salaries show $75,917 for entry-level roles and $121,170 for senior civil engineers.

Which states pay civil engineers the most?

California has the highest mean wage of any state, at $124,540, in May 2025 BLS data. California’s mean sits $15,870 above the national mean of $108,670. After the MERIC cost adjustment, California’s wage falls to about $88,800, below the unadjusted national mean. Alaska, New York, Washington and Massachusetts complete BLS’s top five.

After cost-of-living adjustment, Washington keeps the most purchasing power of the five high-wage states, at a cost-adjusted wage of $102,200.

Does a PE license or master’s degree raise civil engineer pay?

The PE license does. ASCE’s 2026 report shows nearly $49,000 more in median income than engineers with no credential.

A master’s degree has no documented premium, because no current public salary source breaks out what it adds for civil engineers. For your pay bands, price the PE credential first.

Is civil engineering a stressful job?

Yes, and the amount of work is the biggest driver. That answer rests on one study of engineers and architects rather than civil engineers alone. Workload is the driver a firm owner can plan for through staffing and phase budgets.

Engineers and architects in the Engineering Management Institute’s 2023 study reported working 44 hours weekly and said they would prefer 38. Respondents named the amount of work as the biggest driver of burnout, followed by challenging clients and unrealistic deadlines. Civil and structural engineers reported less burnout than their peers, at 23% compared with 38% for mechanical engineers, with burnout measured as the share who said it is a problem very often or always. ASCE’s 2025 survey also found that 86.2% of respondents were satisfied with their jobs.