Manufacturing Engineer Posted Median Jumps to $222,000, but on 21 Listings

Manufacturing Engineer postings with a salary attached carried a median of $222,000 over the last 30 days, up from $156,000 in the 30 days before that. That is a $66,000 move, or about 42 percent, and it is the kind of number that deserves its footnote before it deserves its headline.

The footnote: the recent pool is 21 listings. The prior pool was 71. These are employer-posted pay ranges, annualized to USD (hourly converted at 2,080 hours), taken only from postings on the boards we crawl that disclose a range at all. Twenty-one salaried listings is a small sample, and the count fell by roughly 70 percent between the two windows. When the volume of disclosing postings drops that hard, the mix of who is left disclosing does a lot of the work.

Where $222,000 sits

For scale, among occupations with a large enough posted-salary pool to report on their own, Mechanical Engineer posts a median of $185,275 across 126 listings, Software Engineer $240,000 across 1,301, and Engineering Manager $280,000 across 240. The new Manufacturing Engineer figure lands between the mechanical and software benchmarks — a place it did not sit a month ago, when $156,000 put it well below all three.

Manufacturing Engineer is not the only technical title moving up on a shrinking pool. Among the occupations with a measurable posted-median shift:

• Analytics Engineer: $155,000 to $220,000, on 7 listings in each window.
• Quality Engineer: $156,075 to $203,000, on 20 listings then 10.
• Sales Executive: $263,450 to $312,500, on 48 listings then 32.

And moving the other way:

• Network Engineer: $219,350 to $160,000, on 16 listings then 5.
• Lawyer: $289,970 to $214,500, on 33 listings then 10.
• Operations Manager: $188,000 to $142,500, on 58 listings then 24.
• The generic Engineer title: $179,545 to $90,750, on 14 listings then 5.

Every one of those pools is smaller in the recent window than the prior one. That is the shared condition across this whole set, not something specific to manufacturing. Manufacturing Engineer at 21 listings happens to have the third-largest recent pool of the eight, behind Sales Executive (32) and Operations Manager (24).

The hiring side

Manufacturing Engineer did not crack the top occupations by new postings this week across the boards we track — that list is led by Software Engineer at 64 new postings, Product Manager at 19, and Registered Nurse at 18. So the pay move is not riding on a visible surge in openings for the title.

The wider picture is steady. We logged 9,666 new postings in the last seven days against 7,679 the week before, and 29,685 over the last 30 days against 28,305 in the prior 30 — a gain of under 5 percent month over month. Open listings stand at 57,990 from 686 employers. Industrial employers are active in that flow: Ranger Boats added 527 postings this week, Tyson Foods 238, and Stryker Corporation 196.

If you are negotiating for a manufacturing engineering role right now, $222,000 is a real median of real posted ranges — it is just a median of 21 of them. Treat it as a data point with a wide error bar, and check the Occupations index again when the pool refills.