How many engineers are there in the US? 1.8 million, and software developers almost match them

There were 1,800,740 engineers on US payrolls in May 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey. That is 11.6 engineers for every 1,000 jobs. Their median annual wage was $108,620.

The count leaves out software developers. BLS files them under computer occupations, not engineering, and there were 1,687,890 of them. Add them in and the US has about 3.5 million people with an engineering or software engineering job. Software developers alone are 94% as many as every civil, mechanical, electrical, industrial and other engineer put together, and they earn a higher median, $135,980.

OEWS counts wage and salary jobs. Self-employed engineers and partners who draw no salary are not in it.

By discipline

Civil and industrial engineers are almost tied for the largest discipline, 2,100 jobs apart. Computer hardware engineers have the highest median, $161,740. Petroleum engineers have the highest top tenth: 10% of them earn $253,200 or more. Agricultural engineers are the smallest group, 1,480 people in the whole country.

For comparison, the US employs 754,500 lawyers and 757,220 electricians, so there are 2.4 engineers for every lawyer. Another 220,260 people work as architectural and engineering managers, and 624,930 as drafters and engineering technicians. Neither group is in the 1.8 million.

By state

California has the most engineers, 238,930, and Texas is second with 165,510. Michigan has the highest share of its workforce in engineering, 22.9 engineers per 1,000 jobs, almost twice the national rate. Michigan, home of the Detroit carmakers, has more engineers than New York, a state with more than twice as many jobs.

New Mexico, where the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories are, is second per job with 22.2, then Colorado at 17.5. Arkansas has the lowest rate of any state, 6.1 per 1,000 jobs.

Software developers outnumber engineers in 13 states, including California, New York, Washington, Florida and Virginia. Washington has almost twice as many software developers as engineers, 107,030 against 54,470. In Michigan it runs the other way: 2.3 engineers for every software developer.

Licensed engineers in Texas

A Professional Engineer (PE) licence is needed to seal drawings and to offer engineering services to the public. Engineers employed in industry usually work without one. Texas publishes its full PE roster, which shows how far the licence reaches.

The Texas Board of Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors roster lists 70,955 active PE licences, against 165,510 engineering jobs in the state. The roster has no licensee address, and engineers in other states hold Texas licences to seal Texas projects, so the two numbers do not measure the same people.

Civil engineering is where the licence matters. Texas has 32,380 active PE licences with civil as the primary branch and 34,870 civil engineering jobs. For mechanical engineering the numbers are 12,057 licences and 22,080 jobs, and for industrial engineering 357 licences and 30,980 jobs.

The employer with the most active Texas PEs is the Texas Department of Transportation: 1,247 licensees list it, under the two spellings "Texas Department of Transportation" and "TXDOT". The next are the engineering firms Burns & McDonnell (565 under two spellings), Jacobs (518), AECOM (486), HDR (302) and WSP (298).

How we counted

National and state counts are BLS OEWS May 2025, cross-industry, read from the national and state files BLS publishes (national_M2025_dl.xlsx and state_M2025_dl.xlsx). The national engineer total is the published minor group 17-2000. The state files carry no 17-2000 row, so each state count is the sum of the detailed 17-2xxx occupations BLS publishes for that state. Where BLS suppresses a detailed cell, that occupation is missing from the sum, so a few state counts are slightly low; the CSV shows how many cells were suppressed in each state. The state sums total 1,778,010. Software developers are SOC 15-1252. The Texas figures come from the TBPELS PE roster (roster_pe.zip) downloaded on 15 September 2026; a licence is counted active when its status is ACT, and the branch is the first of up to three branch codes on the licence. Employer names are as licensees typed them.

Source: ProfessionLens, November 2026.