Hardware engineer salaries by region and skill level 2026

[electronx]

Hey everyone,

I’m doing a quick market check on hardware engineering compensation for 2026.
I’d love to learn about your region/location , main skillset/level, and your actual net income (monthly or yearly). If you hire or contract, what rates are you seeing?
The information you provide will also guide other people. thank you!

[nctnico]

Electronics engineering is by far the lowest paying job. If you want to earn real money, get out of electronics engineering.

[tom66]

Pure electronics engineering doesn't pay well.

An electronics engineer that can do software/firmware, FPGA design and understands high speed buses, video processing etc. will make good money... at least relative to other engineering.  And it's a very hard job to replace with AI (though parts of it certainly can be.)

I call this "full stack hardware engineering" in analogy to the web development term.

As a typical example in the UK:
Electronics engineer (junior) - £35k
Electronics engineer (senior) - £45k
Electronics engineer (principal/lead) - £55-70k (but very rare to find!)

FPGA engineer (senior) - £60-75k

Full stack hardware engineer (senior) - £65-75k
Full stack hardware engineer (principal/lead) - £85-110k
Full stack hardware engineer (staff) - £120-150k (but usually internal promotion, very rare to hire directly)

[nctnico]

Good money can be made in embedded software engineering. Still dealing with hardware but not so much in the design process. I think part of the 'problem' is that an electronics engineer needs very expensive tools. While a software engineer only needs computer and a subscription to Claude. Nowadays a lot of the development software is free.

[nctnico]

One way to add value to yourself is to learn how to drive Claude code to make you more productive. There is some uncertainty where it comes to how affordable using AI will be in the future but I think it is worth the gamble today. I think Claude can certainly help to check designs and simulate circuits. I have used Claude to optimise component values for example.

[tom66]

Good money can be made in embedded software engineering. Still dealing with hardware but not so much in the design process. I think part of the 'problem' is that an electronics engineer needs very expensive tools. While a software engineer only needs computer and a subscription to Claude. Nowadays a lot of the development software is free.

Well the other issue is productivity.

A software engineer can probably churn out pages of code per day and develop a new feature for a program in weeks.

And a typical embedded system will have a lot more software behind it than it will have hardware.  There might be 4-8 weeks of hardware development work behind a project but 52 weeks of software development work...

[thm_w]

I’d love to learn about your region/location , main skillset/level, and your actual net income (monthly or yearly). If you hire or contract, what rates are you seeing?

Any reason you haven't provided info?

Typical here in BC for embedded EE is $30 - $65/hr, average $50 CAD, which is low compared to USA.
You'll make 40%+ more if you work in industrial/instrumentation, eg oil and gas or power.

Sometimes I start questioning whether the work I do is worth the salary I receive. This is the answer to why I started this thread.
The information you provide will also guide other people. thank you!

You can look on glassdoor/indeed/etc. Its really dependent on the company and culture though, for me.