The Web-based survey of 7,800 IEEE-USA members paints a picture of increasingly lucrative pay for engineering professionals. Last year's median salary rose $11,100 over the $82,000 median in 1998, when the survey was last conducted. By comparison, the EE Times' 2000 Salary & Opinion Survey reported a median of $82,800. Results of the 2001 survey will be published Oct. 29.

The total median income in the IEEE-USA's 2001 survey (which reports on 2000 wages), including salary and other compensation, rose to $99,000 in 2000, up from the $87,200 total median income in the previous survey. Both median figures represent a 13.5 percent gain in absolute dollars over the two-year period. When total household incomes were computed, the respondents' median household income was $118,000 in 2000, when the cry for technical workers was at its peak.

"The sharp rise in pay won't be a real surprise to anyone, as we had a super-heated employment market last year," said Dick Ellis, a consultant who has written the IEEE-USA salary surveys since 1995. "Our survey looks at what people were getting in 2000, recording the end of the dot-com period. It will be interesting to see how the results hold up next year. I don't expect to see pay go down in next year's survey, but I don't think it will go up much."

Ellis said the latest survey shows a continued widening of the pay differential between the top and bottom 10 percent of various engineering professionals. Overall, respondents reported a $97,000 split between those in the upper and lower 10 percent. The highest decile had a median of $162,000, while those in the lowest 10 percent had a median of $65,329.

"That is a bigger difference than there has been in the past," Ellis said. "It's not like the bottom has gone down, it's that the top has gone up. Employers seem to be willing more and more to jack up what they pay for people who are really good."

One of the largest gaps between the top and bottom wage earners was for those in the Engineering and Human Environment (EHE) category, which includes engineering managers. High-end wage earners made $162,000, while those in the lowest 10 percent earned $62,000. The median salary for the entire category was $98,350.

Historically, the EHE category has had the highest salaries of IEEE-USA survey respondents. But this year, the base salary for some technical specialties surpassed that management group.

"You could always count on the managers making more than anyone else, but not any more," Ellis said. "Some of the technical specialists make more. That's going to make engineers happy, to think that they are making more than the managers."

Wages for solid-state circuit designers, reported as $112,000, surpassed managers' salaries. A handful of other technical specialists — those working with electron devices, broadcast technology, computer hardware, Internet development/applications, and those involved with engineering in medicine and biology — exceeded or matched the base $98,350 salary of the EHE category.

There's also a huge difference between the various levels of engineering expertise. The IEEE groups engineers into nine levels, ranging from the entry-level (GS-5) to the highest level (GS-15), which includes deans in the university environment. At the second (GS-7) engineering level, the top decile made $90,000, and the lowest decile earned less than half that, $43,000. The disparities were wider at the GS-15 level, with the top 10 percent reporting a median of $288,000, and the lowest decile reporting a median of less than a third that amount, $85,000.

Engineers who work in industrial application and systems and control had the lowest wages of those surveyed. Nevertheless, these wages were well above national norms. In the industrial area, the median salary was $84,300, while systems and control engineers earned $84,150.

The survey shows that wages are higher on the east and west coasts, where living expenses are generally higher, according to past surveys. Salaries are highest by far in San Francisco, where the median was $122,000 in 2000. The median was $104,000 in Boston and Baltimore, and was $102,000 in San Diego.

Salaries in the major cities of other regions came close, with Chicago and Raleigh-Durham, N.C. tallying medians of $96,000 and $94,000 respectively. But in smaller cities, such as St. Louis and Tampa, Fla., median wages are $78,000 and $79,500 respectively.

When survey data was organized by years of individual service, the IEEE-USA data shows that salaries top out at around 30 years of experience, when workers generally either move into management or leave engineering. Those with less than two years of experience earn a median of $70,000, which rises to $77,000 for those with three to six years of experience. The survey's typical respondent, with 20 years of experience and more than 10 years with the current employer, earned a median salary of $98,685.

For those with 20 to 24 years of experience, the lowest 10 percent made a median of $68,000, while the top 10 percent earned $153,000. The highest earners are those with 30 to 34 years of experience, with a median wage of $105,000 last year.

Though stock options have been ballyhooed over the past few years, "the median value of stock options in 2000 was zero" for the typical IEEE-USA member, according to the report's executive summary. Even so, stock options exceeded $1 million dollars for 73 surveyed engineers, or about 1 percent of the 7,800 respondents. But that figure did not offset the declining value of options reported by the third of respondents who received them.

Those who got options set their value at $5,000, less than half the value of options reported in the 1999 survey. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents didn't receive options.

"There were people who got options worth a million or more, but for the typical EE, forget it," said Ellis. The 1999 survey also showed that "for the average engineer — if there is such an animal — the value of stock options was effectively zero," Ellis said.

Unemployment for EEs in 2000 was at its lowest level in memory, the IEEE-USA said. At the start of last year, only 0.6 percent of those asked to participate in the survey said they were unemployed.

The study also showed a dramatic uptick in pay during the latter half of the 1990s. When measuring real income in 2000 dollars, engineering salaries leapt from $84,926 in 1997 to $104,720 in the 2001 survey. By comparison, this adjusted income was $82,591 in the 1985 study, and by 1995 it crept up to only $83,095 in constant 2000 dollars.

This year's survey marks the first time that the IEEE-USA has conducted its survey solely over the Web, a technique which doubled the number of respondents. Future studies, which will now be done annually instead of every other year, will also be done via the Web. Only IEEE-USA members chosen to participate are given the Web address for the survey.