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Mechanical engineers

Also called Design engineer, Product development engineer, Mechanical design engineer, Product engineer, Systems engineer

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 296,810 US mechanical engineers, with median pay of $104,110 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 306,990, in May 2019, close to the May 2025 count. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 7,000 from 1880, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for mechanical engineers: Integrated FEA/CFD simulation and PLM, 2000 to 2020.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 11.2% 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). Mechanical engineers: jobs and pay since 1880 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/17-2141

Chicago

Future History. "Mechanical engineers: jobs and pay since 1880." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/17-2141.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_17_2141, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Mechanical engineers: jobs and pay since 1880}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/17-2141}}, 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
1850187519001925195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Mill engineer / Engine wright / Machine builder (pre-professional era)
Known then as Mechanical engineer / Civil-and-mechanical engineer (informal title, overlapping disciplines)
Known then as Mechanical Engineer (ASME professional designation, slide rule era)
Known then as Mechanical Engineer (post-war industrial era, drafting board to 2D CAD)
Known then as Mechanical Engineer (parametric 3D CAD era: Pro/E, SolidWorks, NX)
Known then as Mechanical Engineers (BLS SOC 17-2141, generative design and AI simulation era)
Known today as Mechanical Engineers (BLS SOC 17-2141, generative design and AI simulation era)
Projected to still be called Mechanical Engineers (BLS SOC 17-2141, generative design and AI simulation era)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
297K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$104,110

≈ $101,441 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1847

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) is founded in Birmingham, England, on January 27, 1847, with George Stephenson -- who built the Rocket locomotive in 1829 -- as its first president. The founding marks the first formal professional society specifically for mechanical engineers, distinct from civil engineering. The United States would follow 33 years later with ASME.

Beat · 1878

The University of Minnesota awards the first bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering in the United States to Charles S. Bushwell, reflecting the growing demand for systematic university training in machine design and energy systems. Before this, engineers trained primarily through apprenticeships in workshops. Within two decades, MIT, Cornell, Purdue, and Stevens Institute had established dedicated ME programs; the profession was transforming from craft to credential.

Beat · 1880

February 16, 1880: thirty prominent US industrialists, educators, and engineers gather at the offices of American Machinist magazine in New York City to found the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Chair Alexander Lyman Holley, the steel engineer who had introduced Bessemer steelmaking to the US, convenes a group that includes Henry Rossiter Worthington and John Edison Sweet. ASME's first major act would be setting safety standards for steam boilers -- the single most dangerous industrial technology of the era, responsible for hundreds of deaths annually from explosions. ASME today represents over 130,000 members in 151 countries.

Beat · 1943

World War II creates an unprecedented surge in demand for mechanical engineers. The US war production effort -- manufacturing 300,000 aircraft, 100,000 tanks, and 2 million trucks between 1942 and 1945 -- required mechanical engineers in every major industrial sector. ASME membership grew rapidly during the war; engineering schools compressed four-year programs to three years to accelerate graduate supply. The manufacturing infrastructure built during the war years created the industrial base that would employ a generation of mechanical engineers through the 1950s and 1960s.

Beat · 1957

The Soviet Sputnik launch on October 4, 1957, triggers a massive US investment in engineering education and aerospace engineering. The National Defense Education Act (1958) channeled federal funding into engineering and science programs; engineering school enrollment, including mechanical engineering, grew substantially through the early 1960s. NASA's formation in 1958 created a large new employer of mechanical engineers: spacecraft propulsion, thermal protection systems, and structural engineering all required mechanical engineering expertise. The decade from Sputnik to the Apollo program's peak in 1969 was the fastest growth period in the history of US mechanical engineering employment.

Beat · 1972

Hewlett-Packard releases the HP-35 -- the world's first scientific pocket calculator -- in January 1972 at $395 (equivalent to roughly $2,800 in 2024 dollars). Within five years, the slide rule that had defined the engineer's identity since the 17th century was obsolete. The HP-35 and its successors (HP-65 in 1974, the first programmable calculator; TI-59 in 1977) transformed engineering calculation from an art of estimation to a process of rapid precise iteration. Slip-stick cases disappeared from engineer's belts by the late 1970s.

Beat · 1982

AutoCAD version 1.0 ships in December 1982, running on personal computers rather than expensive mainframe terminals. Autodesk founder John Walker and co-founders release the software at the first COMDEX show in Las Vegas. Within a few years, CAD workstations running AutoCAD replace drafting tables in most US engineering firms. Industry accounts describe early 1980s layoffs among commercial draftspeople as "significant" in small and mid-size companies. The mechanical engineer acquires a new direct role: the author of the production drawing, no longer dependent on a drafting intermediary.

Beat · 1988

Parametric Technology Corporation releases Pro/ENGINEER in 1988 -- the first commercially successful parametric, associative, feature-based solid modeling system. PTC was founded in 1985 by Samuel P. Geisberg; Pro/ENGINEER introduced the concept of encoding design intent as parameters and constraints rather than fixed geometry. The system was adopted rapidly by aerospace and automotive firms; Boeing, Ford, and General Motors were early customers. Pro/ENGINEER transformed the mechanical engineer from a 2D drafter to a 3D simulation architect, for the first time allowing the engineer to virtually test an assembly's fit and interference before any physical prototype was built.

Beat · 1995

SolidWorks 95 ships in November 1995, bringing parametric 3D solid modeling to a Windows desktop at a fraction of Pro/ENGINEER's price. SolidWorks Corporation was founded in 1993 by MIT graduate Jon Hirschtick; the company's pitch was that SolidWorks could do 80 percent of what Pro/ENGINEER did for 20 percent of the cost. Dassault Systèmes acquired SolidWorks for $310 million in 1997. The democratization of 3D CAD through SolidWorks expanded the population of engineers who could access solid modeling from a few thousand at large aerospace and automotive firms to tens of thousands at mid-market manufacturers, contract firms, and startups.

Beat · 2024

Ansys SimAI reaches general availability as a standalone product in 2024, training surrogate models on historical Ansys simulation data to predict 3D physics performance 10 to 100 times faster than traditional solvers. In October 2025, Sumitomo Riko published a validated case study showing more than 10x simulation speedup on automotive rubber-bush component design using SimAI. Siemens NX Copilot, released July 2025, reports early adopters saving more than 40 percent of time on common NX tasks through natural-language command interfaces. These tools are the steepest acceleration in the engineering workflow since parametric CAD in 1988, compressing the iteration cycle from weeks to hours without removing the engineer from the loop.

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 mechanical 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
+11.2%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 17-2141 (Mechanical engineers): 298.5 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 332.0 thousand in 2035, a change of +33.5 thousand (+11.2%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (0.5% of this occupation in 2025). 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)
37.2%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 17-2141.00 Mechanical Engineers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.372, 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) 0.186 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.558; GPT-4-rated β 0.453. 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 mechanical engineers

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

AI is sitting alongside you hereAccelerate FEA and CFD simulation cycles using Ansys SimAI: train surrogate models on historical simulation datasets

Accelerate FEA and CFD simulation cycles using Ansys SimAI: train surrogate models on historical simulation datasets; run AI predictions of structural stress, thermal gradients, or fluid dynamics 10–100x faster than full solver runs; use SimAI confidence scores to gate when re-training or a high-fidelity solver run is required before accepting a result.[4],[10]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

SimAI confidence scores indicate when a design geometry is outside the training distribution and the AI prediction is unreliable: treat any low-confidence result as requiring a full solver validation before submission. Build a personal library of known failure modes where surrogates underperform (sharp geometric features, multi-physics coupling, near-buckling regimes) and apply heightened scrutiny in those regimes.

AI is sitting alongside you hereGenerate and evaluate topology-optimized geometry candidates using Autodesk Fusion generative design or PTC Creo 12 GDX: specify load cases, manufacturing method constraints (additive, CNC milling, casting), and material options

Generate and evaluate topology-optimized geometry candidates using Autodesk Fusion generative design or PTC Creo 12 GDX: specify load cases, manufacturing method constraints (additive, CNC milling, casting), and material options; review the AI-produced candidate set for structural adequacy, cost-weight trade-offs, and manufacturability before selecting geometry for detailed CAD development.[11],[8]

Where your edge is

Generative design tools produce multiple geometry options, but selecting the right candidate requires engineering judgment: verify that AI-generated shapes respect assembly clearances, fastener access, and production tolerances the solver does not model. Build a design-review checklist specific to your manufacturing process to evaluate AI candidates systematically rather than relying on solver objective scores alone.

AI is sitting alongside you hereCollaborate with manufacturing engineers and suppliers to validate that designed components are producible: review DFM (Design for Manufacturability) reports surfaced by AI tools (CoLab AutoReview, Fusion manufacturing simulations) that flag wall thicknesses below castability limits, undercuts that require additional fixturing, or drawing callouts inconsistent across sheets

Collaborate with manufacturing engineers and suppliers to validate that designed components are producible: review DFM (Design for Manufacturability) reports surfaced by AI tools (CoLab AutoReview, Fusion manufacturing simulations) that flag wall thicknesses below castability limits, undercuts that require additional fixturing, or drawing callouts inconsistent across sheets; adjudicate whether to redesign or accept risk.[9],[1]

Where your edge is

AI DFM tools catch geometric and drawing consistency issues systematically, but the business decision of whether to fix a flagged issue before tooling release, or accept the manufacturing risk and address it post-pilot, depends on program schedule, tooling lead time, and supplier relationship context that no tool has. Build supplier process knowledge (injection molding, casting, sheet metal) so you can override AI recommendations with defensible engineering judgment.

Where mechanical 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 mechanical engineers who build program management, vendor management, and technical leadership skills are well-positioned to move into Engineering Manager roles. This transition is especially timely as organizations need managers who can evaluate and govern AI tool adoption, deciding which generative design or simulation AI platforms to invest in, setting AI-output review standards, and building team capability. Engineering Managers retain the technical credibility of an ME background while operating at a scope (budget, headcount, roadmap) where AI displacement pressure is minimal. BLS projects sustained demand for engineering managers tied to industrial and infrastructure investment.

What you'd add
· Engineering program management: scope, schedule, budget ownership; earned value tracking
· AI tool evaluation and governance: building team review standards for generative design and simulation AI outputs
· People management: hiring technical staff, performance reviews, career development coaching
· Executive communication: translating technical risk into portfolio-level business impact
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of mechanical engineers changed since 1847?

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

  • Slide rule, drafting board, and physical calculation (pre-electronic era)

    For over a century, the mechanical engineer's primary instruments were the slide rule (logarithmic calculator enabling rapid multiplication, division, and trigonometric calculation) and the drawing board (where draftspeople translated engineer sketches into precise technical drawings). The slide rule dates to the early 17th century but became a fixture of professional engineering in the 19th century; generations of engineers wore leather slide rule cases on their belts as a badge of technical identity. Every structural stress calculation, every heat-transfer estimate, every gear-ratio derivation was performed manually on paper or slide rule. Engineering firms maintained large drafting rooms staffed by draftspeople who converted engineering calculations into production drawings -- a workforce of intermediaries between the engineer's intent and the manufactured part.

    Effect on the work

    The slide rule era defined engineering as a profession requiring exceptional mental arithmetic and graphical communication skill. Large engineering departments were labor-intensive: a senior engineer might direct several junior engineers and a pool of draftspeople. The ratio of support staff to lead engineers was high.

  • Scientific calculator and early 2D CAD (HP-35, 1972; AutoCAD 1.0, December 1982)

    Hewlett-Packard's HP-35 -- the first scientific pocket calculator -- launched in January 1972 and eliminated the slide rule within about five years. By the late 1970s, slide rules were museum pieces; programmable calculators (HP-41C, 1979) enabled engineers to code short algorithms for repetitive calculations. AutoCAD version 1.0 shipped in December 1982, making computer-aided drafting accessible on a personal computer for the first time. AutoCAD was initially built for mechanical engineers and transformed drafting from a specialized support occupation into something engineers could do themselves. Contemporary industry accounts describe the early 1980s as the period when "CAD software sent many draftsmen to the unemployment lines." The 2D CAD era also introduced digital drawing archives and the ability to reuse geometry, dramatically reducing redraw time.

    Effect on the work

    The combination of scientific calculators and 2D CAD over roughly a decade substantially reduced the number of draftspeople required per engineer. This was the first major labor substitution event in the occupation: the drafting-room workforce shrank as engineers took on direct drawing responsibility. Engineering headcount itself did not decline; the productivity gain was absorbed by wider design scope rather than fewer engineers.

  • Parametric 3D solid modeling (Pro/ENGINEER 1988, CATIA V3 1988, SolidWorks 95, Unigraphics)

    Parametric Technology Corporation released Pro/ENGINEER in 1988 -- the first commercially successful parametric, associative, feature-based solid modeling system. Its core insight: rather than drawing geometry, an engineer specified design intent through parameters (dimensions, constraints, relationships), and the software maintained those relationships automatically as the design changed. A hole specified as "diameter 10mm, centered on face A" would move correctly when face A moved. This was architecturally different from 2D CAD or previous 3D surface modelers. SolidWorks 95 (November 1995) brought the parametric solid-modeling paradigm to a Windows desktop at a fraction of Pro/ENGINEER's cost, democratizing 3D CAD across mid-market manufacturers. The 3D era eliminated the remaining manual-calculation and physical-prototype-dependent design tasks: stress analysis, thermal simulation, and kinematic simulation could now be run directly on the solid model before any metal was cut.

    Effect on the work

    Parametric 3D CAD substantially increased per-engineer design throughput -- the same engineer could now fully define a complex assembly, check interference between parts, and run basic FEA within a single software environment. The transition compressed product development cycles by months in automotive and consumer electronics. Physical prototype counts dropped as virtual iteration replaced bench testing for most non-safety-critical design decisions.

  • Integrated FEA/CFD simulation and PLM (Ansys Workbench, SolidWorks Simulation, Siemens NX, Teamcenter)

    The 2000s brought simulation into the mainstream engineering workflow. Finite element analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD), previously the domain of specialists on expensive workstations, became integrated modules within standard CAD packages: SolidWorks Simulation (formerly COSMOSWorks, acquired 2001), Ansys Workbench (2000), and NX Advanced Simulation. An engineer could now run a structural stress analysis on a part without leaving the CAD environment or hiring a specialist. Product lifecycle management (PLM) platforms -- Siemens Teamcenter, PTC Windchill -- added data management and change control, eliminating the paper-based drawing-control systems that had governed engineering document management since the 19th century. By the 2010s, a mechanical engineer at a mid-size manufacturer had direct access to tools that in 1990 would have required a team of specialists.

    Effect on the work

    Integrated simulation reduced the headcount of specialist simulation engineers at larger firms while enabling smaller engineering teams to perform analysis that previously required outside consultants. However, it also raised the expected output per engineer, increasing competitive pressure on those who had not upskilled into CAE tools.

  • AI-native design: generative topology optimization, simulation surrogates, and PLM copilots

    Autodesk Fusion Generative Design launched in 2018 as the first commercially accessible AI topology optimization tool integrated into a mainstream CAD platform. Rather than iterating manually on a shape, an engineer specifies load cases, manufacturing constraints, and material options, and the software explores hundreds of geometry candidates automatically. PTC Creo 12 (June 2025) added simultaneous structural-thermal generative design. Ansys SimAI (GA 2024, restructured 2026 R1) introduced surrogate-model simulation prediction faster than traditional solvers. Siemens NX Copilot (July 2025) and SolidWorks Aura (beta July 2025) brought natural-language command interfaces to the major CAD platforms. Siemens reported early NX AI adopters saving more than 40 percent of time on common tasks. The net effect is a substantial compression of the design iteration loop: simulation cycles that previously took hours are completed in minutes; design-space exploration that previously required weeks of manual CAD work can be set up in an afternoon. Engineers who adopt these tools effectively operate at a new productivity level -- not a different job, but a vastly accelerated version of the same judgment-intensive work.

    Effect on the work

    Too early to quantify displacement. The parallel that holds from the 1982 AutoCAD and 1988 Pro/ENGINEER shifts is instructive: technology that compresses the design loop has historically increased demand for engineers rather than reducing it, because it lowers the cost of product development and thereby expands the market for engineering work.

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Mechanical Engineers employment and pay by year

On record since1847
Latest US employment296,810 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$104,110 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+11.2% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • Canada (NOC 21301)

    Employment, 2020
    54,950, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 21301 Mechanical engineers, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
    Median pay, 2020
    C$96,000, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 21301 Mechanical engineers, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.
View all 29 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
18807,000n/aEst., ASME Foundation Researched contextReport
193070,000n/aDecennial Census 1900 Researched contextReport
1950195,000n/aDecennial Census 1900 Researched contextReport
1970215,000n/aEst., BLS Monthly Labor Review Researched contextReport
1982n/a$32,300BLS historical bulletin 1982 Researched contextReport
2000207,300$58,710BLS OEWS 2000 Official statisticReport
2003207,810$63,910BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
2004217,010$66,320BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
2005220,750$67,590BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
2006217,500$69,850BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
2007222,330$72,300BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
2008233,610$74,920BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
2009232,660$77,020BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
2010234,400$78,160BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
2011238,260$79,230BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
2012252,540$80,580BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
2013258,630$82,100BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
2014270,700$83,060BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015278,340$83,590BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016285,790$84,190BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017291,290$85,880BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018303,440$87,370BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019306,990$88,430BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020293,960$90,160BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021278,240$95,300BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022277,560$96,310BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023281,290$99,510BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024286,760$102,320BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025296,810$104,110BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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