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Marine engineers

Official title Marine Engineers and Naval Architects (SOC 17-2121)

Also called Naval architect, Ship designer, Naval engineer, Marine structural engineer, Ship engineer

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 8,250 US marine engineers, with median pay of $112,230 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 11,360, in May 2019. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 3,500 from 1900, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for marine engineers: 3D integrated ship design systems, 1995 to 2018.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 6.7% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Marine engineers: jobs and pay since 1900 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/17-2121

Chicago

Future History. "Marine engineers: jobs and pay since 1900." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/17-2121.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_17_2121, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Marine engineers: jobs and pay since 1900}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/17-2121}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
187519001925195019752000now
2026
Known then as Naval Architect / Marine Engineer (early professional era, RINA-era UK; informal US practice)
Known then as Naval Architect and Marine Engineer (SNAME professional era)
Known then as Naval Architect / Marine Engineer (engineering license era, PE and USCG endorsements)
Known then as Marine Engineers and Naval Architects (BLS SOC 17-2121)
Known today as Marine Engineers and Naval Architects (BLS SOC 17-2121)
Projected to still be called Marine Engineers and Naval Architects (BLS SOC 17-2121)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
8K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$112,230
Est.

≈ $109,353 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1860

January 16, 1860: the Royal Institution of Naval Architects is founded in London at the Hall of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. Founding members include John Scott Russell (designer of the SS Great Eastern), Edward Reed, Nathaniel Barnaby, and John Penn. The founding mission is to advance "the science and art of Naval Architecture" through shared research. This date marks the moment naval architecture became a recognized profession rather than a guild craft. RINA received its Royal Charter in 1910.

Beat · 1893

The Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers (SNAME) is founded in the United States by thirteen leaders from across the US maritime sector, including William H. Webb, George E. Weed, and Rear Admiral George W. Melville. The founding responds to the weakened state of American commercial and naval shipbuilding after the Civil War and creates a forum to advance "practical and scientific knowledge" in shipbuilding and marine engineering. SNAME remains the primary professional organization for US naval architects and marine engineers, with over 6,500 members as of 2026.

Beat · 1898

The David W. Taylor Model Basin opens in Carderock, Maryland, as the US Navy's primary facility for ship resistance and propulsion research. Model-basin testing became the empirical foundation of hull-resistance prediction: full-scale resistance could not be computed analytically, but scale-model towing tank results, scaled by Froude similarity laws, gave engineers the power prediction curves they needed to specify propeller size and installed engine power. Taylor himself developed the Taylor Standard Series, a systematic set of parent hull forms whose model-test results naval architects could interpolate for new designs. The model basin defined the quantitative culture of early 20th-century naval architecture.

Beat · 1943

World War II creates the largest shipbuilding mobilization in US history. At peak in 1943-1944, approximately 1,033,900 workers were employed in US shipyards. The United States built nearly 9,000 ships during the six years of the war; naval architecture and marine engineering programs ran accelerated three-year degree programs and the Navy transferred the Reserve Officers Naval Architecture Group from Annapolis to the University of Michigan to meet demand. The wartime buildout established the University of Michigan NAME department as the primary US pipeline for professional naval architects. The University of Michigan's model basin, acquired in 1904, became essential training infrastructure during the war.

Beat · 1981

The Reagan Administration terminates the Construction Differential Subsidy (CDS) program, which had subsidized US commercial shipbuilding against lower-cost foreign competition. The commercial US shipbuilding market collapses: orders for large oceangoing commercial vessels fall from 69 the year Reagan was elected to zero by his last year in office. By the late 1980s, US commercial shipbuilding has effectively ceased. Naval architects and marine engineers who had worked on commercial programs migrate to Navy programs (DDG-51 destroyer, LPD-17 amphibious ship), offshore oil and gas design, and Jones Act ferry and tanker construction. The structural decline of US commercial shipbuilding is a defining context for the profession through the 1980s and 1990s.

Beat · 2023

July 2023: the International Maritime Organization adopts its revised GHG Strategy at MEPC 80, setting an ambition of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions from international shipping "by or around 2050" and introducing a carbon intensity improvement pathway of 20% by 2030 and 70% by 2040. The strategy is the most consequential regulatory development in naval architecture since the introduction of SOLAS after the Titanic disaster. It is forcing the redesign of the global merchant fleet: new-builds must now incorporate alternative-fuel propulsion (ammonia, methanol, wind-assisted) capable of operating carbon-neutrally by mid-century. This is a generational engineering program that the BLS identifies as a primary driver of the +6% projected employment growth for marine engineers and naval architects through 2034.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace marine engineers? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+6.7%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 17-2121 (Marine engineers and naval architects): 8.4 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 8.9 thousand in 2035, a change of +0.6 thousand (+6.7%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers. The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
40.4%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 17-2121.00 Marine Engineers and Naval Architects. Shown: human-rated β = 0.404, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.263 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.544; GPT-4-rated β 0.421. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for marine engineers

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereOptimize voyage fuel consumption and route planning for an operating fleet using Wartsila Voyage Connect or NAVTOR AI voyage planning: configure the speed-power model for each vessel from sea-trial and noon-report data

Optimize voyage fuel consumption and route planning for an operating fleet using Wartsila Voyage Connect or NAVTOR AI voyage planning: configure the speed-power model for each vessel from sea-trial and noon-report data; run AI-generated optimal route and speed profiles accounting for weather routing (GRIB forecast data), current schedules, port ETAs, emission control area (ECA) fuel changeover points, and CII (Carbon Intensity Indicator) rating compliance; review AI-recommended speed reductions or route deviations against commercial constraints (charter party speed/consumption warranties, berthing windows, port tide windows) before issuing the revised voyage instruction to the master.[10],[14]

Where your edge is

AI voyage optimization tools like Wartsila Voyage Connect can reduce fuel consumption per voyage, but the AI's weather routing assumes the vessel's stability and structural strength allow the recommended route. For voyages through heavy weather, the marine engineer or nautical advisor must review whether the AI-recommended route exposes the vessel to sea states that produce parametric rolling, slamming loads on the bow structure, or cargo shifting risk: none of which the voyage optimizer explicitly models. Develop a practice of cross-checking AI-recommended weather routes against the vessel's polar diagram, structural slamming limits, and cargo securing manual before issuing routing instructions for heavy-weather passages.

AI is sitting alongside you hereConduct CFD analysis of hull resistance, propulsor-hull interaction, and seakeeping behavior using Numeca FineMarine or Star-CCM+: set up the computational domain, mesh, and boundary conditions for the hull at design speed in calm water and regular-wave seakeeping conditions

Conduct CFD analysis of hull resistance, propulsor-hull interaction, and seakeeping behavior using Numeca FineMarine or Star-CCM+: set up the computational domain, mesh, and boundary conditions for the hull at design speed in calm water and regular-wave seakeeping conditions; use AI-surrogate models trained on the CFD database to run parametric sweeps of trim, appendage configurations, and propeller diameter at a fraction of full-simulation cost; validate resistance prediction against model-test results using ITTC correlation allowances; deliver the power prediction curve and propeller design basis to the machinery engineers.[15],[1]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

AI surrogate models for hull resistance trained on CFD datasets accelerate parametric design sweeps but generalize poorly to hull forms far outside the training distribution: novel bow geometries (X-bow, axe-bow, wave-piercing catamaran hulls), ice-reinforced sections, or unconventional multihull configurations may produce large surrogate prediction errors that are not flagged as out-of-distribution by the model. Before using a surrogate prediction as the basis for a propeller design or contract speed guarantee, run a few full CFD validation cases at critical points in the design space and compare against model-test correlation from a towing tank. CFD sign-off on contract speed guarantees carries commercial liability: verify that the full simulation, not the surrogate shortcut, underlies the final prediction.

AI is sitting alongside you hereDesign and optimize hull form geometry for a new vessel using NAPA Designer with AI-assisted hull form optimization: specify the design constraints (displacement, beam, draft, block coefficient range, speed-power targets), configure AI-driven parametric variation of bow, stern, and midbody geometry within the NAPA 3D hull surface environment

Design and optimize hull form geometry for a new vessel using NAPA Designer with AI-assisted hull form optimization: specify the design constraints (displacement, beam, draft, block coefficient range, speed-power targets), configure AI-driven parametric variation of bow, stern, and midbody geometry within the NAPA 3D hull surface environment; run resistance and powering predictions via the integrated ML surrogate coupled to NAPA's hull form database; evaluate hydrostatic stability (GZ curve, metacentric height) and freeboard calculations for Load Line compliance; iterate to the Pareto-optimal hull form balancing resistance, stability, and cargo capacity before committing the form to the full design spiral.[5],[1]

Where your edge is

AI hull form optimization in NAPA Designer compresses parametric trade studies from weeks to hours, but the tool optimizes within the constraints the naval architect specifies, if the design constraints fail to capture a critical requirement (minimum metacentric height in the damage condition, ice-class bow geometry requirements, shallow-water squat margin), the optimizer will produce a hull form that is formally optimal but unacceptable in practice. Build a rigorous requirements-capture and review protocol: before initializing any AI optimization campaign, complete a full hydrostatic and loading-condition requirements matrix traceable to the applicable SOLAS stability requirements and IMO Load Line Convention. Review each AI-proposed form against the full stability booklet requirements, not just the primary resistance objective.

Where marine engineers go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Architectural and Engineering Managers

Senior naval architects and marine engineers who develop strong program leadership, classification society interface, and AI tool governance skills are well-positioned to move into Engineering Manager roles overseeing ship design programs or fleet technical management operations. This pivot is particularly well-timed as shipyards, ship owners, and offshore energy companies urgently need managers who can evaluate and govern the rapidly expanding AI toolset in naval architecture, deciding which NAPA Designer optimization workflows, AVEVA Marine digital twin investments, or ABS My Digital Fleet fleet-performance analytics deployments to adopt, setting validation standards for AI-assisted structural calculations before class submission, and leading the alternative-fuel vessel design programs that represent the most consequential maritime engineering investments of the decade.

What you'd add
  • · Marine engineering program management: managing design-spiral milestones, class plan approval schedules, shipyard interface coordination, and owner's delivery inspection programs
  • · AI tool governance for naval architecture: defining validation frameworks for AI-optimized hull forms and structural calculations before class submission; setting data-quality standards for fleet performance digital twin deployments
  • · Contract and commercial management: shipbuilding contract terms (SAJ, BIMCO NewBuildCon forms), owner's representative responsibilities at the shipyard, defect liability management
  • · People leadership in technical design offices: managing teams of naval architects, marine engineers, and CAD designers; cross-functional coordination with classification societies and flag-state administrations
  • · IMO regulatory strategy: tracking IMO GHG regulations, flag-state interpretation divergences, and classification society rule changes that affect the design program and advising shipowner on regulatory risk
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of marine engineers changed since 1775?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Mould loft and drawing board (craft-guild ship design era)

    Before professionalization, ship design lived entirely on the mould loft floor: full-scale lines plans were scribed onto the loft-floor planking with splines and battens, and shipwrights transferred dimensions directly to timber frames. The drawing board existed but was secondary to the loft. Hull form knowledge was proprietary and embodied in the master shipwright. There were no formal stability calculations, no structural analysis tools, and no education pathway. Iron hulls and steam engines broke this model decisively: the structural forces in an iron girder beam and the thermodynamic behavior of a steam engine could not be designed by eye.

  • Drawing board, slide rule, and scale-model testing (professional engineering era)

    The professionalization of naval architecture from 1860 onward was built on the drawing board and the slide rule. Hull lines were drawn in three views (body plan, sheer plan, half-breadth plan) at reduced scale on drawing paper; offsets were tabulated by hand; hydrostatic properties (displacement, metacentric height, stability curves) were computed with planimeters and Simpson's rule applied by hand to the offset table. Physical scale models were towed in model basins to measure resistance before committing to a design. The William Froude towing tank at Torquay (1872) and the David Taylor Model Basin in Washington (1898) formalized model testing as the empirical backbone of hull resistance prediction. This era's tools required practitioners to be deeply fluent in applied mathematics because every calculation was manual. The tools also defined the rhythm of design: a hull form took weeks of manual calculation and drawing before it was ready for model testing.

    Effect on the work

    The drawing board and slide rule era sustained a highly skilled but modestly sized professional workforce. US shipbuilding employed large numbers of production workers, but the naval architect and marine engineer design team was small relative to the yard workforce. The demand for design professionals was closely tied to shipyard orders; feast-or-famine employment patterns followed military contracts.

  • Electric analog computers and early digital mainframes (MIT computation era)

    The first digital computers reached naval architecture design offices in the mid-1950s, initially as IBM mainframe installations at major naval shipyards and design bureaus. MIT developed early ship-motion and structural analysis programs in the late 1950s and 1960s; David Taylor Research Center ran finite-element structural analyses on early Univac and CDC mainframes. For the naval architect, early computing meant that the manual calculation of stability curves, flooding progressions, and structural stress distributions could be delegated to the machine, freeing the engineer to work at a higher level of design iteration than the slide rule permitted. The change was incremental, not revolutionary: computers were batch-processing mainframes accessed through punch-card jobs, not interactive design tools. The designer still worked on paper at a drawing board; the computer processed the numbers that the designer specified.

  • Computer-aided ship design (FORAN, CADDS, NAPA early era)

    The FORAN system, developed by SENER in Spain, was one of the first dedicated CAD/CAM platforms for ship design; it achieved commercial deployments from the early 1970s and established the model of integrated hull-form definition, structural arrangement, and outfitting design in a single digital environment. In the United States, the CADDS system and early versions of NAPA (developed in Finland from 1989) brought interactive 3D ship modeling to design offices. The shift from drawing board to CAD was the single most disruptive tool transition in the history of naval architecture: it eliminated the draftsman function (previously a large share of design office employment), compressed the time from lines plan to production drawing by an order of magnitude, and made full 3D structural models possible for the first time. Lofting, which had previously required a separate skilled workforce of loftsmen working on full-scale loft-floor layouts, was replaced by mathematical hull-surface definitions in the CAD system.

    Effect on the work

    CAD eliminated the draftsman and loftsman functions that had previously accounted for a substantial fraction of design office employment. Naval architect headcount per project fell as individual practitioners could now produce in hours what previously required a team of draftsmen for weeks. Total employment in the profession did not collapse because the transition coincided with an offshore energy buildout that created new work, but the ratio of naval architects to drafters shifted sharply in favor of the licensed professional.

  • 3D integrated ship design systems (AVEVA Marine, NAPA, ShipConstructor)

    By the mid-1990s, 3D integrated ship design platforms had matured into commercially dominant tools. AVEVA Marine (formerly Tribon, then Aveva), NAPA from Finland, and ShipConstructor became the primary platforms at major shipyards globally. These systems moved beyond 2D CAD to full 3D structural, outfitting, and piping models in a single environment, enabling interference checks across disciplines (structure versus piping versus HVAC) that had previously required manual cross-referencing of paper drawings. The productivity gain was substantial: a ship that required two years of drafting time in the 1970s could now be fully designed in six months. For the naval architect, the 3D model became the single source of truth: stability calculations, structural scantlings, weight estimates, and production drawings all derived from the same digital model. The role shifted from producing drawings to managing a digital model and validating its compliance with classification society rules.

  • AI hull optimization, digital twins, and generative design (NAPA Designer AI, ABS Eagle FE-DLA, DNV Veracity)

    The 2018-2026 period brought a qualitatively different kind of tool to naval architecture: systems that do not just assist the engineer in executing a design decision, but generate and evaluate design candidates autonomously. NAPA Designer's AI-assisted hull form optimization (2024-2025 release) explores parametric design spaces, running resistance, stability, and capacity trade-offs faster than any human could manually iterate. ABS Eagle FE-DLA automates spectral fatigue life assessment across thousands of structural hot spots simultaneously. DNV Veracity and ABS My Digital Fleet use machine learning anomaly detection on fleet performance data to monitor vessel health continuously. The IMO decarbonization mandate (net-zero shipping by 2050, adopted July 2023) accelerated the deployment of these tools: alternative-fuel vessel designs (ammonia, methanol, hydrogen propulsion) create safety and structural engineering challenges that AI-assisted parametric analysis can help evaluate at a scope that manual methods cannot. The licensed naval architect remains the person who signs the stability booklet and defends the structural calculation to the classification society reviewer; AI is the analytical engine that expands the design space the engineer can explore before committing to that signature.

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Marine Engineers and Naval Architects employment and pay by year

On record since1860
Latest US employment8,250 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$112,230 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+6.7% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error
View all 29 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
19003,500n/aEst., SNAME Researched contextReport
194312,000n/aEst., University of Michigan Researched contextReport
19505,500n/aEst., University of Michigan NAME Researched contextReport
1969n/a$12,500Est., University of Missouri Libraries Researched contextReport
19798,000n/aEst., ENO Center for Transportation Researched contextReport
20004,680$60,890BLS OEWS 2000 Official statisticReport
20034,960$70,490BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
20046,620$72,040BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
20056,550$72,920BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
20067,810$72,990BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
20076,620$76,200BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
20086,480$74,140BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
20095,270$74,330BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
20105,720$79,920BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
20115,470$84,850BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
20126,880$88,100BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
20136,640$89,550BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
20147,570$92,930BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
20157,600$93,110BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
20168,120$93,350BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
201710,960$90,970BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
201811,350$92,560BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
201911,360$92,400BLS OEWS May 2019 (employment) Official statisticBLS OEWS 2019 (pay) Official statisticReport
20208,700$95,440BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
20217,380$93,370BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
20227,450$96,910BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
20239,960$100,270BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
20248,440$105,670BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
20258,250$112,230BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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