Electrical Engineer
Also known as: EE, Electronics Engineer, Circuits Engineer, Electrical Design Engineer
Design, develop, and test electrical systems and equipment, from power grids and semiconductors to consumer electronics.
Salary Range
The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for electrical engineers.
About 1 in 333 reaches this level
About 200K electrical engineers (BLS Employment Projections, SOC 17-2071, 2025); only ~576 reach Principal/VP Hardware Engineering at top semiconductor firms (Intel, Qualcomm, NVIDIA) at ~$370K total comp, about 0.3% of the field.
Salary data based on 2025 BLS, Glassdoor, and industry reports. Actual compensation varies by location, experience, and employer.
How to Become One
This career typically requires a bachelor's degree. Here are the top colleges for it:
Cost to Qualify
Four years of tuition and required fees runs about $56K at a typical public college in our list (in-state) and about $288K at a typical private one. Both are pricier than the US national averages (about $48K public in-state, $180K private nonprofit, College Board 2025-26) because our 161-college dataset only includes nationally-ranked schools, not every US college. This excludes room and board, which we show separately on each college's page.
Sticker price, not what most people pay — scholarships, aid and in-state status all move it. Room and board is shown separately on each college's page.
AI Risk Assessment
The government expects AI to have little effect on electrical engineering jobs. When the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) studied how AI would change its job projections (February 2025), it wrote that electrical and electronics engineering jobs 'may be even more insulated' from AI than other engineering fields, because the country needs so much new circuitry and infrastructure for power-grid upgrades and electric-vehicle manufacturing. AI tools for chip and circuit design already exist, and BLS still expects the job to grow.
The current BLS projection agrees: electrical and electronics engineering jobs are expected to grow 8% from 2025 to 2035, much faster than the 3% average, with about 16,300 openings a year. BLS names semiconductors, solar arrays, consumer electronics and communications technology as the areas driving that growth. Measured AI use is low. Anthropic's March 2026 study, which tracks how much of each job's tasks people already use its Claude AI for at work, puts electrical engineers at about 6%, compared with 75% for computer programmers.
This stays at 2 (Low), not 1, because a real part of the job is design and testing work done at a computer, which AI tools can speed up, so new engineers will be expected to work with them. But demand is growing fast enough to absorb that.
What would change the score: if BLS lowers its projection because of AI, or if hiring of new electrical engineers falls while chip and grid spending stays high, this would move to 3.
Sources
Ratings reflect a 10-year outlook based on 2025-2026 research, weighted toward entry-level impact. Individual outcomes will vary.
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