Industrial Designer
Also known as: Product Designer, Commercial Designer, Product Design Engineer, Consumer Product Designer
Design the physical products people use every day — from electronics and furniture to appliances and vehicles — balancing form, function, and manufacturability.
Salary Range
The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for industrial designers.
About 1 in 71 reaches this level
About 35,400 commercial and industrial designers (BLS Employment Projections, SOC 27-1021, 2025); VP/Director of Design at ~$290K total comp exists at maybe 400-600 companies, though not all came up through industrial design.
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
Industrial designers design the physical things people use: phones, chairs, power tools, kitchen appliances, medical equipment. The early, on-screen part of the job is where AI is moving fastest. Design software now includes "generative design" that suggests shapes to meet goals like weight and strength, and image tools can turn a rough idea into concept renderings. In a 2025 field experiment published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, 776 employees at Procter & Gamble worked on real new-product challenges. People working alone with AI did as well as two-person teams working without it. They were researchers and business staff rather than designers, but it is strong evidence that AI can stand in for a teammate on product concept work. A 2025 Microsoft Research study that measured how much of each job's tasks AI chatbots can help with put commercial and industrial designers in the top third of 785 jobs. That points to the rubric's "3 Moderate": the concept and rendering work that junior designers have usually done is where teams can shrink.
The rest of the job keeps it from going higher. Designers have to understand materials, how a product gets made, what it costs to make, and how it feels in someone's hand, and that means building and testing prototypes. BLS projects only 2% growth from 2025 to 2035, slower than the average for all jobs, with about 2,800 openings a year, mostly to replace people who leave. It expects demand for new high-tech products to help, but job losses in some manufacturing industries to hold growth down. With so little growth, there is not much extra demand to soak up the time AI saves.
What would change this score. If design studios and in-house teams start hiring fewer junior designers as AI takes over concepting and rendering, this goes to 4. If AI stays a sketching aid while prototyping and manufacturing know-how remain the hard part, it stays at 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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