To Download a PDF Version of this document, please click here: 2025 Chemical Engineering Compensation Report
Compiled January 2025
By: Adam Krueger
Sun Recruiting
US Chemical Engineering Compensation Report 2025
Special Thanks:
I'm very grateful to all of you chemical engineers out there who not only participate in the survey, but for the trust you've placed in me with your data. I don't take it for granted that you share personal information with me and I treat that trust you've given me seriously. I also want to thank my colleague Hue Polinski for his assistance in helping me put this together this year. It takes many hours to clean the data and then analyze it, and he was a huge help to me in that effort.
Methods:
This salary report was based on 1,761 unique data points all of which were collected via a web form on the Sun Recruiting website from December 2nd, 2024 to January 6th, 2025. I used email, LinkedIn, the Chemical Engineering subreddit and word-of-mouth to spread the message that I was looking for data. Respondents answered a series of 31 questions covering topics including base and non-base compensation, work schedules, industry type, degree level, etc. The collected information was analyzed by me and all identifying information was removed prior to analysis. I’m a recruiter not a statistician – I’ve attempted to provide as much transparency as possible in my comments as to why I chose certain methods over others, or where I think the dataset is weak.
New this year is the use of AI analysis. I removed all identifying information and used ChartPixel and Julius AI to analyze the data for correlations. ChartPixel, in particular, was very helpful in generating graphs and charts that display the data well. Julius AI allowed me to perform some statistical analyses that otherwise would have been out of reach for me.
Previous iterations of the salary report are available – please email me if you’d like a copy of the 2024, 2023, 2022 or 2020 reports.
Negotiation Service
Do you have an offer or are you approaching a review/promotion situation? Do you want help negotiating? I have a fee-based service for that – I guarantee results (for new offers) and will work with you to maximize your offer; click the link for more information.
**How to Use This Data (Please Read):**
Many of the data points in this survey are MEDIAN data points, meaning that 50% of the responses were higher and 50% were lower. I’ve also included percentiles – this should be a concept most people are familiar with, and the idea is similar to median. If you are at the 75th percentile, that means that 25% of respondents have a base salary higher than that number and 75% have a base salary lower than that number.
I encourage people not to get lost in the weeds with something like this. This data, while specific, isn’t specific to each individual situation. This data should give someone a broad-strokes approximation of where they stand in relation to their peers. What I envision is that the various data points would be used together – for example, if you are 18 years into your career, you live in the Midwest, you are a manager and you work in the Industrial Gases industry, use the data here as it relates to all four of those categories to determine how you compare to your peers. If you have any questions, please reach out to me via email or LinkedIn and we can talk it over.
Glossary: N = Number of Respondents, M/F = Male/Female, IC = Individual Contributor, Mgr = Manager
The Data
ChartPixel allowed me to perform an overall correlation analysis on the dataset and it spit out a heatmap of what correlates to what, so I figured I would share that first. As it turns out, years of experience is strongly correlated to base salary – even more than whether someone is a manager or individual contributor.
Here is how the AI put it:
The most significant predictor of an individual’s overall years of experience is their current base salary (and vice versa), followed closely by whether they hold an MBA or EMBA degree. This suggests that more years of experience and advanced business education levels are strongly associated with higher salaries. Other notable features include the number of years worked in the current role and various certifications like Six-Sigma and Project Management Professional (PMP), which also contribute to explaining the variance in overall experience, albeit to a lesser extent.
An interesting observation is the relatively low importance of demographic factors such as gender and the industry of the current company, which might typically be expected to have a more substantial impact. Additionally, some features like the extent of work travel and certain company benefits (e.g., remote work or hybrid schedules), have zero importance. This could be due to these features having little to no variation in the dataset or not being directly related to the accumulation of work experience.
COMPARSION BY YEARS OF EXPERIENCE
The above confirms my confidence in 'overall years of experience' being the best predictor of base compensation, which is relieving because that's the hunch I've based all of my compensation reports on since I started doing this (*whew*). Here is this year's data presented in graph form, and I've included the data table below that as well, with some additional information included there.
Commentary:
I'll include interesting trend information at the end of this report. Sneak peak: median base salaries are up about 5-6% year-over-year. I made two slight adjustments to my approach this year: 1) I lumped anyone with more than 20 years of experience into one category. Last year's numbers didn't make a whole lot of sense beyond 25 years, and if I make "21+" it's own category, it's a good sized data set. 2) Work travel turned out not to be well-correlated to anything, and so I took that column out and added in the average years of the respondents at each experience level. That way, you can see how the data set is weighted. Most of them, predictably, fall near the middle. This should be helpful to the reader in gauging where they are relative to the middle of the data set. If you fall to one side of the other of the average, you could logically skew the numbers up or down a little to determine where you're at relative to peers of a similar experience level.
COMPARSION BY LEVEL OF EDUCATION
Last year, I gathered data on what degree level respondents had achieved and this year, I did the same thing, but added a category for MBA, which had been requested by several people. I had previously assumed that it wouldn't make much difference whether someone had a technical master's degree or an MBA, but it turns out that assumption was wrong.
Commentary:
These results largely mirror last year's data - so I won't belabor any obvious points. There is one thing I want to draw attention to, and that's because this is going to end up being a theme in this report...advanced degrees and certifications matter more early in your career than they do later in your career. Many times over the years, I've had people ask me, "do you think I should get an MBA/PE/Six-Sigma Cert/etc"? From now on, my advice is going to be, if you're early in your career, it's a differentiator and definitely something you are going to be paid more for, but the further into your career you get, the more your overall body of experience matters. The notable exception here appears to be those who pursue a PhD-level of education, but I also don't want to say that definitively because my sample sizes for chemical engineers with over 11 years of experience, who also have a PhD, are limited (I would feel better if those samples were 25+ data points).
As a quick aside - I ran this data through Julius AI and performed a statistical analysis to determine the overall financial premium based on degree level. In your early career, a PhD has the most significant premium (28.1% for 0-5 years and 25% for 6-10 years). As experience level increases, an MBA has more of a premium (7.1% for 11-15 years and 6.3% for 16-20 years). A technical master's degree always has a premium over a Bachelor's degree, but the premium percentage is fairly low (1-4%). A PhD also always has a premium, but that premium drops to 4-10% in the later career years (16-20 and 21+).
Another reminder -- these data points are meant to be used together to form an overall picture for your given situation. This analysis is based on degree, but not on whether a person was a manager or individual contributor, or where they live, which are also factors that are going to matter. I've also included the average years of experience within each dataset so that you can see where the center point of the dataset is, to help you further dial in where your particular situation fits into all of this.
COMPARSION BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTORS AND MANAGERS
This data continues to fall in line with previous years' surveys. As a reminder, I start the data table at the 6-10 year mark because prior to that, the vast majority of respondents are individual contributors (this year, 92% of the respondents with less than 6 years of experience were individual contributors).
Commentary:
Whereas certifications and advanced degrees are more valuable earlier in your career, there is a premium, at all levels of experience, for management versus individual contributor. Are there exceptions to this in the data set? Certainly - but by-and-large, if you want to make more money, find yourself a way to get on a management track. I'm looking not only at base salary, but also at the bonus targets, which are higher for managers. I pointed this out last year, but using this year's numbers: if we look at the 6-10 year range, at the median, a manager is making roughly $15,000 more in base salary than an individual contributor, and their bonus target at the median is 5% higher, meaning the manager is bringing home $161,000 compared to the $137,000 of the individual contributor, a difference of $24,000/year ($120,000 over 5 years). Something to point out: that manager is also working an additional 175 hours per year - if you break that down to hours worked per year, again on average, that's 2,405 for the manager, 2,230 for the individual contributor...and if you make that an hourly rate -- the manager is making ~$67/hour and the individual contributor is making ~$61/hr.
COMPARSION BY GEOGRAPHICAL REGION
I've been asked by many to try and get more granular with this analysis and I would love to...but in order to break this down by state even, I would need more data points than I have (Sidenote: I did provide a graph at the end of this report that does give a rough comparison between states, but I must emphasize that it is a ROUGH comparison). This is a generalized look at the country as a whole - it is meant to convey broad trends, and I've included the 2024 numbers side-by-side with the 2025 numbers so you can see the year-over-year trends.
Commentary:
It's interesting that this year's dataset is, on average, about 2-3 years older than last year's. So, I see the increases in every region, but some of that has to be simply because of that fact. The discrepancies in level of experience between the regions also accounts for some of the difference in compensation (particularly true for the Mountain West category, I believe). Another interesting thing I'll point out - those reporting that their current company offers a work-from-home (WFH) option this year compared to last year, is down significantly. Hybrid schedules and the use of alternative work schedules (9/80 or 4/10) is up.
The reason I think this information is valuable to include in this report is because cost-of-living index is an important thing to consider when benchmarking yourself against your peers. A job in California paying $125,000 is not equivalent to a job paying that same amount in Tennessee. For one, the person in CA is paying state income tax whereas the person in Tennessee is not...and obviously the housing costs between those two locations will also be very different. This chart will be especially important for those who might be considering a job change to another state or region of the country. If I were to rank the compensation-competitiveness of these regions based on relative cost-of-living, I would rank them as follows:
1.) Gulf Coast
2a.) Southeast
2b.) Midwest
4.) Mid-Atlantic
5.) Intermountain West
6.) Northeast
7.) Coastal West (particularly in the big cities of LA, San Francisco, and Seattle)
INDUSTRY PERKS COMPARISON
I introduced this data in 2023 and transparently, I thought it was going to be a flop. It's a wall of data, and not particularly specific, but I heard from many that they loved being able to compare between industries. So, I've made it an even bigger wall.
If you haven't seen this before - I present the data here in two ways - first I give you the percentage of respondents that responded, "Yes, my company offers _____." Second, I color coded the numbers. Green means that sub-industry is above the overall industry average in that category and red means that they are below the overall industry average (the overall averages across all respondents is at the top). Within each category, I highlight the above and below average outliers. The 'sample size alert' applies here for several of the industry categories. If there are less than 50 data points for a category, I'm not convinced of the validity of the sample size.
Commentary:
First, I appreciate everyone who has given feedback on this section - it has helped me come up with an even better list of sub-industries (there might be too many now) and has given me ideas of what to ask about. Again, this chart is not meant to be very specific, but rather to provide some broad-strokes information on differences between industries. Here are some differences between this year's information and last year's that I'd like to highlight:
- Median Base Salary across the industry is up ~6-7% from year over year ($128K this year, $120K last year), same average number of years' of experience, and average hours' worked. Keep that number in mind when we compare year over year data later in this report.
- Work from home - 29% of respondents reported that their employer offered this last year, it was 14% this year.
- Education Reimbursement: 52% of respondents reported that their employer offered this last year, this year it was 74%!
- Sign-On Bonus for New Hires: this is up significantly, from ~40% last year, to almost 60% this year. I've heard that it's more of an 'employers market' in other industries, but in the chemical processing space, it is still very much a candidate-driven market.
COMPARISON BETWEEN MALE AND FEMALE ENGINEERS
This is going to be an interesting section - mainly because where I didn't see much of a difference between male and female engineers last year, this year the data suggests there is a difference. It's not an extremely significant difference, but it is a difference. To quickly answer the question you have in your head in case this is your first time seeing this -- yes, I didn't ask about gender in the survey. For each response I went down the list and based on name, I marked F or M. If I couldn't tell based on the name, I made an attempt to figure it out via LinkedIn. If that yielded no information, I left it blank. My methods will improve over time, please give me the benefit of the doubt.
Commentary:
I don't trust the validity of the data in the 21+ experience category, the sample size for Female engineers there is too small, so my commentary will be on the rest of the dataset. At the median, there isn't much of a difference -- but there is a difference...and it's more pronounced than last year. When I ran a statistical analysis in Julius AI, it found that the gender gap in the 0-5 Years range was about 4.3%, and the gap dropped to 1.1% at the 6-10 Years range.
What I really want to call your attention to, however, is in the 75th and 90th percentile ranks. It is there that we see a significant discrepancy. The numbers tighten up a little in the 75th percentile, as years of experience builds, but the separation only grows at 90th percentile. Looking back at last year's dataset, I think this was something I missed, because the numbers show it in that dataset as well. I'll leave it to people smarter than me to figure out what this means, but it can't simply be the pace of promotion, because the ratios of ICs to Mgrs holds pretty steady through the data set.
Also - I think I answered a question I had last year regarding the percentage of females in the chemical processing industry. In 2023, the dataset was about 16% females, in 2024, it was just north of 17% and this year, it was just over 16%. The question I had was whether that number reflected the overall industry average, and at this point, I have to conclude that it does.
COMPARISON BETWEEN CERTIFICATIONS
This is a new section this year. I asked about whether people had a PE License, PMP (Project Management Profession) certification and/or Six-Sigma Certifications (and if so, what level). There's no good way to display a table for this data like I have for other comparisons, so I leaned heavily on Julius AI to help me run analyses on this data. Below is a description of the dataset and some of the conclusions drawn from advanced statistical analysis.
Description:
- 8.8% of respondents have a PE License
- 3% of respondents have a PMP Certification
- 27.8% of respondents have a Six-Sigma Certification
- 5.3% reported a Yellow Belt
- 17% reported a Green Belt
- 5.2% reported a Black Belt
- 0.3% reported a Master Black Belt
The statistical analysis I ran in Julius reported that, for respondents with a PE License, the differences in compensation were most pronounced at lower levels of experience (0-5, 6-10). The salary premium for a PE at the 0-5 years range was 16%, however, only 11 respondents in that category reported having earned a PE, so I'm not convinced about the 16% figure. I'm sure there is a benefit, but I would be hesitant to put a number on it.
Given that only 54 people out of 1,761 reported having a PMP Cert, I'm not sure I can draw any reliable conclusions about the financial benefit of that certification. Julius is suggesting there is a benefit, but to assign a number to that benefit with such a small sample size wouldn't be wise. In retrospect, this may be a more popular certification for mechanical engineers to pursue. I invite feedback on other certifications that may be more common for chemical engineers to pursue.
On the Six-Sigma Certification question, I had Julius run a statistical analysis comparing those with a six-sigma certification to those who don't have one and here are the results. I didn't break it down by level of certification based on the lack of sample size depth within each of those levels, so this a straight-up yes/no comparison. Spoiler-alert, there isn't much of a difference, at least in terms of base salary.
Overall, the theme from the comparison in degrees holds here - certifications and licenses have a more pronounced financial benefit early in your career than they do later. The data on six-sigma certification suggests that maybe there is a later-career financial benefit, but the trend of the data suggests the benefit isn't that significant. Does that mean these things aren't worth having? Absolutely not - but it may be that the benefit to your career isn't so much a monetary one. The benefit is more likely the doors that will be opened to you, which may speed advancement opportunities.
TREND DATA:
To me, this is the most exciting aspect of doing these yearly compensation reports - to see trend data over time.
Overall, base compensation increase from 2023-2024 was fairly flat (roughly 1.5-2%), but the overall rate of increase from 2024 to 2025 was ~6%, which is above the industry standard 2-3% increase. The talent war in the industry seems to be centered around the 6-10 and 21+ years of experience ranges, where base compensation has increased the most in those two categories. Sample size alert: as mentioned earlier, I changed my table format slightly this year; opting for a "21+ Years" category rather than breaking it up into '21-25' and '26+'. This served to smooth out the overall arc a little and to have a larger dataset for that final category. Some of what seemed like a drop off in comp in the 26+ year category in previous years is likely because of overall weakness in the dataset, and not reflective of what is actually happening in the overall compensation landscape. Here is similar data to the graph above, but in table format (also adjusted previous years to this year's format):
Discussion/General Comments:
I'm incredibly grateful for the feedback I've gotten on this over the past couple of years in particular. I have gathered all of that feedback and it has made this report stronger year over year. Based on what I hear from talking with you all, the report is being used in precisely the ways I intended it to be used when I started doing this almost 10 years ago -- you and your colleagues are using it to help themselves (and it's working!).
One more interesting tidbit from Julius, the AI I've been using to help me analyze some of this data - I had it run a regression analysis on the financial benefit, in terms of base salary, on a single year of experience. It calculated that at the median, a year of experience is worth approximately $3,250. Over the course of a 30-year career, that's $97,000 total gain.
What's Coming in 2025:
I echo here what I shared in my most recent ChemE Quarterly Newsletter - the arrow seems to be pointed in an upward direction for the chemical processing industry here in the United States. Anecdotally, there is optimism among the people I've talked to - and the macro industry data and hiring trends broadly seem to justify that optimism. With a change in the Administration having already occurred, I will be watching closely to see how changes in the regulatory regime and how threats of increased tariffs end up affecting the overall industry. One thing seems to be certain - President Trump is intent on refilling the strategic petroleum reserves and making the United States a net exporter, which will undoubtably have a positive effect for the Oil & Gas industry, both upstream and downstream. Increased hiring in that sector, along with continued re-shoring efforts related to manufacturing and technology would lead to a further strain on the talent market, which would then lead to further salary compression throughout the chemical processing industry. Of course, this all remains to be seen.
The main challenge from the job market standpoint continues to be high housing prices and high interest rates. Where there used to be a fairly sizeable passive talent market that was able to move relatively inexpensively, there is now a much smaller pool of 'passive' talent. The only people I see moving (geographically) to make a job change are either a) folks who are later in their career to whom the financial costs of a move are not as impactful, b) those who are renting and therefore not tied to mortgage rates and c) the smallest group, which is those who are looking to move as a result of life circumstances (i.e. wanting to be closer to family, etc.).
There was a lot of reorganization and restructure activity in late-2023 into early-2024 and the middle management ranks were hardest hit. I said last year that I suspected we were at the bottom of the business cycle because the type of roles that were most in-demand were money-saving roles like maintenance/reliability and process control. We are still very much in that zone, I don't think the needle moved much in 2024 because of the election, but I am hopeful to see more middle-management and also more producing roles (process/project engineer) as move farther into 2025.
The Only Sales Pitch You'll Get From Me:
I enjoy putting this resource together every year and am gratified to know it is helping people make a difference for themselves, while also bringing much-needed compensation transparency to the industry. All I ask for in return is your consideration in using my firm to help fill open roles, or if you find yourself in a job search, to consider partnering with us in that effort. Our firm specializes in placing engineering and operations professionals throughout the United States within the chemical processing industry, from startups to Fortune 500s.
Website: https://www.sunrecruiting.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamrkrueger Email: adam@sunrecruiting.com
Bonus Charts:
Here are a few charts that I generated based on the data - I didn't find them helpful enough to include in the main report, but they could be interesting to you: