Electrical Engineer Salary Guide 2026

Last updated: May 19, 2026 | By Mike Carter

Electrical engineers in the United States earn $66,020 to $172,340 in 2026 with a BLS national median of $111,910, and the actual offer that lands a hire is more often decided by PLC stack, clearance, and industry vertical than by the years on the resume. Fusion energy, defense aerospace, and senior controls roles regularly clear $160,000 base before a candidate hits eight years on the job. Plant-side maintenance EE seats and field-service positions with the same SOC code run $40,000 to $55,000 lower. Same title on the org chart. Two different markets. Two different budgets.

Mike Carter, Managing Director at KORE1. My background sat on the brand and growth side before this seat. Scaling Electric Visual from the founding team, taking Skullcandy through its IPO, running the Agenda Show during the ComplexCon launch, relaunching FUEL TV+ across more than 100 countries. The pivot to workforce was simple math. Every brand I ever scaled hit its ceiling at the moment hiring stopped being deliberate, and electrical engineering is one of the categories where that ceiling shows up early. The hardware roadmap stalls the day the controls hire gets benched on comp.

Disclosure, because you deserve it up front. KORE1 places electrical engineers across fusion energy, defense aerospace, EV powertrain, medical device, semiconductor, and renewable infrastructure through our electrical engineering staffing practice. We collect a fee when our clients hire through us. The numbers below come from the BLS May 2024 release, six public salary aggregators, and KORE1’s own placed-base across 57 electrical engineering closes between Q3 2025 and Q1 2026. Where the public sources are misleading the budget, I will point at it. Where the band you need is sittable without us, I will say so.

What Seven Salary Sources Report an Electrical Engineer Earns

Run the math across seven defensible sources for EE comp in 2026 and the medians fan out across a $46,000 spread on the same job title in the same calendar year. Six of these sources are public, scrapeable, free. The seventh is the placed-base from our own closes, which is the only one that reflects actual signed offer letters in this specific labor market. Pick the wrong source, anchor your budget there, and the offer round catches up to you fast.

Glassdoor’s $108,420 and ZipRecruiter’s $92,800 both describe an electrical engineer. They are describing two different ones. Glassdoor’s filers skew product-engineering and hardware at recognizable employers. ZipRecruiter’s active listings skew plant maintenance, field service, and lower-tier manufacturing reqs that still carry the EE title. That is a $15,620 gap that has nothing to do with experience and everything to do with which slice of the labor market each platform sees.

Salary.com sits in the middle at $104,200 and reads honest for mid-market industrial and aerospace employers who actually report banded ranges. BLS at $111,910 is the broadest defensible national number, but the 90th percentile of $172,340 is doing a lot of work. The 90th percentile is where the senior controls, the cleared aerospace, and the renewables-grid-side population starts to show up, and BLS lumps them with the general bachelor’s-degree EE population that includes test technicians who got the EE title bumped.

Levels.fyi describes a completely different population. Hardware EEs at Apple, Google silicon teams, Meta Reality Labs, NVIDIA, AMD. Base $185K to $245K. The RSU does the rest. If you are competing for FPGA, ASIC, or board-bring-up talent at that tier, you are not budgeting from BLS. You are budgeting from the offer the candidate already has on the table from the hyperscaler they just turned down.

The KORE1 placed-base at $118,400 is the number that has actually cleared offers we wrote in the last two quarters. It runs above BLS because our search mix is weighted toward fusion energy, defense aerospace, EV, and medical device, where the hardware-side EE seat sits one tier above the national median. It runs below Levels.fyi because we do not place at FAANG hardware. The 25th to 75th band of $96,500 to $144,800 is what the band-builder needs more than any single point.

What Actually Drives the Spread

Three things move the band more than the years on the resume. Industry vertical. PLC and CAD stack specificity. And clearance, where clearance is on the table at all.

Industry Vertical Sets the Floor and the Ceiling

Same job title. Different industries. Different markets. The EE seat at a contract manufacturer in Ohio is doing schematic capture, BOM management, and supplier validation. The EE seat at a fusion energy company in Foothill Ranch is doing high-voltage power electronics for a deuterium-tritium reactor. The title matches. The comp does not.

Take two intakes from last month. Fusion energy client first. Allen-Bradley as the floor, Siemens TIA Portal strongly preferred, $145K base, 15% bonus tied to commissioning milestones on a Q4 test cell. Same week, a Midwest contract manufacturer. Almost the same job-description bullet points. $82K base, no bonus, theory was the SOC code matched and the BLS median was the anchor. Same code, two different markets, a $63K gap on what the candidate cleared. The buyer anchored to BLS misses the fusion offer entirely and overpays the contract manufacturer offer by twelve grand.

Eight industry tiers. A $122,000 spread between contract manufacturing senior and fusion-energy senior. That is on the same SOC code. The mistake hiring teams make is benchmarking off BLS without telling BLS which tier they actually live in. The BLS median for an EE is the average of a population that includes both the $78,000 contract manufacturer and the $300,000 hardware engineer at Apple. Averages of incompatible populations are not useful.

PLC and CAD Stack Specificity

The single largest within-vertical comp lever in 2026 is which PLC and design platform the candidate has shipped on. Same controls EE title, same five years of experience, eighteen-percent comp delta based on whether the candidate has shipped both Allen-Bradley RSLogix 5000 and Siemens TIA Portal in production environments.

The intake that prompted this section was a TAE Technologies search we ran for an electromechanical controls engineer in late April. The req called specifically for Allen-Bradley plus Siemens dual-platform experience. We saw 47 applicants in the first ten business days. Eleven had production Allen-Bradley shipping experience. Three of those also had Siemens TIA Portal in production. Of the three, two were already in active offer cycles with competing buyers. The math is brutal. The talent pool with the exact dual-stack the client wants is roughly six percent of the applicants who self-identify as controls EEs, and that subset is being competed for by every other fusion, semiconductor capex, and EV battery automation buyer at the same time.

One specific test. If your job description says “PLC experience required” and stops there, you have not narrowed the pool. You have just written a filter that catches the lowest-comp applicants alongside the highest. The hiring manager who says Allen-Bradley AND Siemens AND deuterium-environment hardware will get a tiny pool. The one who says “PLC experience preferred” will get 600 applicants and the offer will close at a number that looks like the BLS median. Both happen. Be honest about which you are running.

Clearance Is a Comp Multiplier, Not a Filter

The conventional read is that clearance narrows the pool. That is true, and incomplete. The truer read is that clearance is a comp multiplier the buyer pays whether or not they need it to be one. The candidate with active Secret and a clean SF-86 walks into a defense aerospace EE seat with 10 to 12 percent of negotiating room on base before tenure is even discussed. TS/SCI with a poly takes that to 15 to 22 percent depending on the role and the location.

NetAlly ran an electrical engineer R&D intake with us last month for their Colorado Springs office. The role itself does not require clearance. The talent pool in Colorado Springs is heavily cleared by gravity, because the city’s labor market is built around Air Force Space Command, NORAD, and the surrounding defense subcontractor footprint. The intake conversation surfaced the same point I will make to any hiring team in a cleared metro. You are competing for an electrical engineer who already has options at Lockheed, Northrop, Raytheon, and the smaller subcontractors. Your offer needs to clear the clearance premium even if the role does not technically require the clearance. Colorado Springs in particular runs about $8,000 to $12,000 hotter on base for EE than the BLS state-level data suggests for that reason.

Salary by Experience Level

Experience matters. It matters less than the prior two factors. The bands below are KORE1 placed-base, weighted toward our actual search mix in fusion, aerospace, EV, medical device, and semiconductor. They run above what you will see at a generic Indeed average.

The jump that catches buyers off guard is the senior-to-staff cliff. The senior band tops at $158K mid-vertical. Staff opens at $150K and tops at $195K. The overlap is real and intentional. Title inflation is rampant. The senior EE at a small medical device shop and the staff EE at a fusion company can be doing the same work. Anchor to scope, not title.

Salary by Specialization

EE is not one job. It is a dozen jobs that share a degree. The comp range inside one specialization is tighter than the range across the whole title.

The ASIC tier is its own universe and most readers of this guide are not staffing for it. If you are, the public salary data is irrelevant. Pull Levels.fyi for your target employers and pay close to their base plus the four-year RSU equivalent. Anything less and your offer reads insulting to a candidate who already has two competing offers.

Salary by Metro

Geography matters in 2026 the way it always has, with two new wrinkles. First, the remote arbitrage that was real in 2021 and 2022 has largely closed. Hardware engineering is on-site work. Lab time, EMC chamber time, board bring-up bench time. Companies stopped paying San Francisco salaries to remote EEs in Indianapolis around mid-2024. Second, the clearance metros run hotter than BLS would suggest because of the labor-market gravity discussed above.

One pattern that surprises buyers. Phoenix and Boise both jumped 14 to 18 percent on senior EE base over the past 24 months on the back of the TSMC and Micron fab expansions. The labor market does not have enough cleared and uncleared semicap-fluent EEs to staff what is being built, and the band moved to find the talent. If you are hiring in either metro and benchmarking off 2023 numbers, you are budgeting at least $18,000 low.

Total Comp Beyond Base

Base is the headline. It is not the offer. The senior EE who clears $150K base at a defense aerospace prime is often clearing $185K total. The same candidate at a fusion startup is clearing $172K base plus an early-stage equity stack that may or may not be worth anything. Honest about that.

The total-comp gap that hurts the most is the one at early-stage hardware companies. Picture two offer letters on the kitchen table. Fusion startup, $148K base, an equity stack on top. Defense prime, $145K base, a 12 percent bonus paid out in cash at year-end. Looks like a wash. Then the candidate’s spouse opens a spreadsheet. What if the startup misses its next funding round. What if the liquidity event slides 18 months. What if the strike price gets reset after a flat round. The boring bonus suddenly looks like the better paper. Senior EE candidates have run this exact spreadsheet, often after watching a previous employer’s equity grant turn into a tax-loss carryforward. Your offer letter has to acknowledge the math.

The KORE1 Placed-Base View: What Recent Searches Actually Cleared

The aggregator numbers describe a population. The placed-base describes what an offer letter said when the candidate signed. We closed 57 electrical engineering searches between Q3 2025 and the end of Q1 2026, weighted toward fusion energy, EV powertrain, defense aerospace, semiconductor capex, and medical device. Average base $118,400. Average time to first interview, 9 calendar days. Average time to offer, 23 calendar days. Our electrical engineering staffing practice runs hot on these verticals because that is where the demand sits in this cycle.

Two recent intakes ground the numbers. TAE Technologies opened the controls EE search referenced earlier with a $145K base ceiling. We placed at $152K base plus a 15% performance target after the candidate brought a competing offer from a semicap automation buyer. The talent pool with dual-platform Allen-Bradley plus Siemens production shipping experience is a six-percent slice of the broader controls applicant pool and the buyers in fusion, semicap, and EV battery automation are all competing for the same six percent at the same time.

NetAlly’s Colorado Springs R&D EE search closed at $138K base. The role does not require clearance. The local labor market does, by gravity. The candidate had passed three rounds at a defense prime before our slate landed, and the comp had to clear what the prime was likely to write before NetAlly could close. We closed it. The lesson generalizes. Benchmark off the local market, not the BLS state-level.

Other recent placements from the same window. An EV inverter design EE at a Tier 1 OEM in Detroit at $142K base plus RSU. A power-electronics engineer at a grid-storage company in the Bay Area at $168K base plus equity. A medical device EE with IEC 60601 experience at $128K base in San Diego. A test and validation EE at $98K base for a contract manufacturer in the Midwest. The spread on these closes was $70,000 base. The spread on title was zero. Every one of them was hired as “electrical engineer.”

How to Build the Band for Your Open Req

Forget the BLS median for a minute. Build the number from the seat outward.

Step 1: Define the vertical, not the title

What industry. What product. What stage. A controls EE at a fusion-energy startup and a controls EE at a packaging plant share a title and almost nothing else. Anchor to the vertical band in the industry table above and ignore the BLS national median.

Step 2: List the stack that is non-negotiable

Allen-Bradley plus Siemens production shipping. Altium PCB design with high-speed signal integrity. FPGA in Vivado plus Verilog. Whatever yours is. Be specific. The job description that says “PLC experience required” gets the wrong applicants. The one that says “RSLogix 5000 production shipping required, Siemens TIA Portal preferred” gets the right applicants, fewer of them, and they cost more. Pay them.

Step 3: Add the clearance premium honestly

If the role requires Secret or higher, add 12 to 22 percent to the base off the vertical mid-band. If the metro is cleared by gravity (Colorado Springs, Huntsville, Northern Virginia, El Segundo, San Antonio’s defense corridor), add 6 to 10 percent even if the role itself does not require clearance. You will be competing with the buyer who does require it.

Step 4: Pull two metro comps and split the difference

Your metro and the nearest larger metro. Senior power-systems EE in Sacramento bases off Bay Area minus 8 to 12 percent. Senior fusion EE in Foothill Ranch bases at LA / OC parity, not Bay Area parity, even though the talent pool is competing with the Bay. The metro table above gives you the anchors. The split-the-difference move accounts for the fact that the local labor market never quite matches the city tier label.

Step 5: Add the total comp envelope

Base plus realistic bonus or RSU. If you are pre-revenue and offering equity, discount that paper to 30 percent of face value when you mentally compare your offer to a public-company alternative. The senior EE candidate already runs this math. If your offer does not, you will lose to a buyer whose paper is real.

Step 6: Run it past a recruiter who places in your vertical

This is the conflict-disclosed pitch. Talk to a KORE1 recruiter who closes EEs in your specific vertical and put the band you just built in front of them. If it is below market, they will tell you. If it is at market, they will tell you why the talent is still hard to land. If it is generous, they will close the search fast.

Common Questions Hiring Managers Ask

Is the BLS median of $111,910 actually a useful number to budget against?

For a generalist bachelor’s-level EE in a mid-market non-cleared non-fusion role, yes, roughly. For everything else, no. The 90th percentile of $172,340 is where the senior controls, fusion, defense, and semiconductor population starts to show up, and a budget anchored to the median will be $40K to $80K low on those roles. Build the band from the vertical and stack first, then cross-check against BLS, not the other way around.

How much does PE licensure actually add to base?

8 to 12 percent for a working EE, concentrated in power systems, utility, MEP, and consulting. Closer to zero for product engineering at a hardware OEM. The seat decides whether the license is a comp lever. Plant-floor controls EE and semiconductor design EE, the PE is essentially decorative. Utility-side and stamped-drawing-side, it is required to do the work and the comp reflects that.

My controls engineer wants Allen-Bradley plus Siemens. Is that really a $20K premium?

Yes, often more in the verticals where the dual stack actually matters. Roughly six percent of self-identified controls EE applicants have shipped production code on both platforms. The competing buyers for that six percent (fusion, semicap, EV battery automation, advanced packaging) are all funded right now and all hiring against the same pool. The premium is what closes offers in that market.

How fast can KORE1 fill an electrical engineering role?

23 calendar days to offer is our weighted average across the 57 EE closes in the last three quarters. Senior fusion energy and cleared aerospace trend longer (5 to 7 weeks). Entry and mid-level controls in industrial automation often close in 2 to 3 weeks. Time to first qualified interview averaged 9 calendar days last quarter, which is the more useful early signal that the search is healthy.

Should we even bother with remote EE candidates in 2026?

For most hardware-side EE work, no. Lab time, EMC chamber time, board bring-up bench time, fab cleanroom time. None of that is remote. For systems-engineering, MBSE, simulation-heavy, and FPGA design roles, hybrid two or three days on-site is achievable. The remote arbitrage that was real in 2021 closed in 2023, and most senior EE candidates now sort openings by where they would actually have to live, not by salary first. Budget for relocation if your metro is not already a target.

What is the comp delta between EE and a senior controls engineer with PLC focus?

In the same vertical, the senior controls engineer often clears within 8 percent of a generic senior EE base. The split tilts toward controls when the role specifies dual PLC platform production experience or motion / robotics. A generalist senior EE at $135K maps to a senior controls EE at roughly $128K to $148K depending on stack specificity. If you are weighing the two, weigh the work, not the title.

How does the EE comp band compare to the mechanical engineer band?

EE runs about $11K to $14K higher than ME at the same vertical and experience tier in 2026. The BLS gap is similar: $111,910 EE median against $99,510 ME median. The gap widens at senior in semiconductor and fusion, where EE-side work is the throughput constraint. The gap narrows in medical device and aerospace, where ME and EE both clear similar bands. Our mechanical engineer salary guide covers the ME side in the same depth.

What does a senior EE actually do day to day?

It depends entirely on specialization. A senior controls EE writes ladder logic, configures HMI, commissions on the plant floor, debugs over the wire. A senior FPGA EE writes Verilog, runs simulations in ModelSim, closes timing, drives synthesis. A senior power systems EE runs short-circuit and coordination studies, stamps drawings, designs protection schemes. The title is a wrapper around ten different jobs.

Is the EE talent shortage real or just hiring-manager complaining?

Real in specific slices, not across the board. Senior power-electronics, cleared FPGA, RF, ASIC, and dual-stack controls are genuinely scarce and the bands have moved 12 to 22 percent in 24 months to reflect it. Generic bachelor’s-level industrial controls and contract-manufacturing EE pools are healthy and the comp has barely moved. Talk about shortage at the slice you are hiring, not the whole title.

The Right Way to Use This Guide

Find your vertical in the industry table. Find your specialization in the specialization table. Find your metro in the metro table. The intersection of those three is your real band, not the BLS median. Add the stack premium if your req actually requires it. Add the clearance premium if the role or the metro warrants it. Discount paper equity to 30 percent of face value when comparing offers. That gets you to a budget that survives the first competing offer.

One more honest read. The labor market for senior EEs in fusion energy, EV battery, semiconductor, defense aerospace, and high-voltage power electronics is not getting easier in the next 24 months. Capex is funded. Heads need to land in chairs. Buyers anchoring to 2023 numbers are losing hires to buyers who have updated their bands. We see it weekly.

If you have an open EE req and want a sanity check on the band, the candidate slate, or the time-to-fill expectation, reach out to a KORE1 recruiter who places in your specific vertical. We will tell you what we see in the market this week, not what the public aggregators saw two quarters ago. You can also explore the broader engineering staffing agency work we do across mechanical, biomedical, controls, manufacturing, and structural. If you are running an EE hire alongside a recruiting decision, the how to hire an electrical engineer guide covers the process side.

Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1.