I get asked this in some version every week. What should I be making? Is what I'm earning normal? Am I way behind?
I'm going to share some numbers, but I want to frame them first, because these numbers can do as much harm as good if they're treated as a target instead of a reference point.
Everything below is ground truth from thousands of conversations, not survey data and not industry reports. It's what I've actually seen working engineers earn. Take it as orientation, not as a goal to chase.
"Healthy" depends on the life you're trying to fund
A mixing business that supports a single engineer with no dependents in a low cost-of-living city looks completely different from one that supports a family in Los Angeles. The same dollar number can be wildly healthy in the first case and crushing in the second.
Before any number is meaningful, the question is: what does your life actually need this business to earn? Most engineers have never sat down and figured this out with precision. They have a vague sense. Vague doesn't work.
The honest first step toward any of the numbers below is locking what you actually need to clear, after taxes and gear costs and savings, to make the math of your real life work. That number is the floor. Anything below it isn't a "healthy" business no matter what the average is.
What I see in working engineers
With those caveats firmly in place, here's roughly what the distribution looks like across the engineers I talk to who are doing this full-time.
The struggling band, $30k–$50k gross. This is the largest group, and the most common state for engineers who haven't done business work yet. The skill is there. The pipeline isn't. Rates are inconsistent. Months are unpredictable. Almost every conversation about money on this tier is about anxiety more than about a number.
The functional but inconsistent band, $50k–$90k gross. This is the engineer who has enough work to feel less precarious but still has bad months. Pricing is inconsistent but better. Pipeline exists but is fragile. They could survive a slow quarter but it would hurt. Most don't have a clear forecast more than 90 days out.
The stable mid-career band, $90k–$160k gross. The engineer who has worked out pricing, positioning, and pipeline well enough that the math holds across a year. There are still slow months, but slow months don't threaten the business. Most engineers here have a small number of repeat clients who anchor revenue, plus a steady stream of new inquiries.
The high-functioning band, $160k+ gross. The engineer who has built positioning specific enough that they get to choose. The work comes to them. Rate raises happen without losing the room. They're not necessarily more talented than the engineers a band below. They're better positioned and they've stopped competing on price.
These ranges are gross, before taxes, gear, and overhead. After all that, the actual takehome can be 50 to 70 percent of those numbers. Less if the business is poorly run.
What surprises engineers
A few things tend to surprise people when they see these numbers.
First, the gap between "skill" and "income" is enormous. There are extremely talented engineers earning under $50k. There are engineers with less technical chops earning much more. The variable is business, not craft.
Second, the leap from the second band to the third is bigger than people expect. Going from inconsistent $80k to stable $120k usually isn't about doing 50 percent more work. It's about doing roughly the same volume of work at higher and more consistent rates. The lift is mostly positioning and pricing, not output.
Third, very few engineers in the top band describe themselves as "selling harder" than the engineers below them. They mostly describe doing the same kind of work for a more specific kind of client. The change wasn't intensity. It was clarity.
Why these numbers are dangerous
I share these reluctantly, because numbers like this become targets. An engineer at $40k reads this and immediately decides $120k is the goal. They go chase it. They generally don't get there.
The reason isn't motivation. It's that the engineers earning $120k didn't get there by deciding to earn $120k. They got there by fixing whatever was broken in their specific business, one piece at a time, in an order that made sense for their particular situation. The number was a result. Not a target.
If you treat these numbers as a target, you'll work on the wrong things in the wrong order. If you treat them as orientation, they can be useful for understanding where you actually are.
What I'd actually look at instead
Less interesting than gross revenue:
- Your effective rate per hour, including revisions and scope creep
- The gap between your stated rate and your closed rate
- How many months of expenses you can survive at zero new work
- How predictable your next 90 days is
Those numbers will tell you more about the health of your business than gross revenue will.
If the numbers above don't match what you'd hoped for your career, the Business Reality Check is a self-serve diagnostic that grades twelve systems in your business and tells you where the actual gap is. The Strategy Call is where we look at what to do about it next.
