UX/UI Designer
Also known as: Product Designer, Interaction Designer, Web Designer
Design intuitive, beautiful digital experiences by researching user needs and crafting interfaces people love.
Salary Range
The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for ux/ui designers.
About 1 in 200 reaches this level
About 132,700 web and digital interface designers (BLS Employment Projections, SOC 15-1255, 2025); only ~500-800 reach VP of Product Design at major tech companies, where total comp (base + bonus + equity) reaches ~$425K.
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
UX/UI designers decide how apps and websites work and look: what goes on each screen, how people move through it, and whether it is easy to use. The "UI" half, producing the screens, is where AI is moving fastest. A 2025 Microsoft Research study measured how much of each job's tasks AI chatbots can help with, using 200,000 real conversations. Web and digital interface designers came out in the top 13% of 785 jobs. Nielsen Norman Group, a leading UX research and training firm, says interfaces are getting cheaper to produce because of standard design systems, and warns that "if you're just slapping together components from a design system, you're already replaceable by AI." BLS says AI tools for web work may slow growth in this field and let people in other jobs do basic tasks themselves. Entry-level jobs are the tightest part: NN/g says senior and generalist roles have recovered faster than entry-level positions, "which remain scarce and highly competitive."
We had this at 4, which means AI doing most of the core work and headcount cuts expected. The evidence we could check does not show that, so we have lowered it to 3. BLS projects web and digital interface designer jobs to grow 6% from 2025 to 2035, faster than the 3% average for all jobs. NN/g says the UX job market has been stabilizing since late 2024, with surveys showing team sizes holding steady, and it calls the story that AI could rapidly replace designers one that "wasn't true" but was convenient for cost-cutting. In a 2024 survey of employers for the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, UI and UX designers were the eighth-fastest-growing job to 2030. This is a high 3. The part of the job most at risk is turning out screens. Research, deciding what to build, and judging what actually works for people are the safer ground.
What would change this score. If companies start cutting design teams or replacing junior designers with AI-generated interfaces, or BLS starts projecting a decline, it goes back to 4. If entry-level design hiring recovers along with the rest of the market, it could come down to 2.
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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