2026 Edition · An annual reference on what work pays

Industrial Engineers

Santa Maria-Santa Barbara, CA metropolitan area. Estimated employment 380.

Data released May 2025 BLS OEWS · SOC 17-2112
Fig. 1 — The wage rule

Where you sit in the distribution

Drag the marker, or type a figure
$119,790 · 50th
$82,00010th
$99,47025th
$119,79050th
$133,22075th
$160,82090th

That is the medianhalf of industrial engineers in Santa Maria earn more.

Table 1 — Adjusted

$119,790 in Santa Maria buys what $110,100 buys across the country as a whole.

Santa Maria's regional price parity is 108.8 — well above the national average — a dollar here buys noticeably less than in the US as a whole. Adjusted figures for other metros are in the nearby-metros table below.

Table 2 — Nearby metros

The same job, elsewhere in California

Adjusted figures apply each metro's regional price parity, so the columns are directly comparable.

Metro areaMedianAdjustedRPPvs. Santa Maria
San Jose$136,950$124,000110.4+12.6%
San Francisco$132,230$114,400115.6+3.9%
Santa Cruz$131,740$119,900109.9+8.9%
Santa Rosa$121,660$112,900107.8+2.5%
Santa Maria This page$119,790$110,100108.8
San Diego$119,050$106,400111.9−3.4%
Vallejo$113,630$104,700108.5−4.9%
Los Angeles$113,040$99,500113.6−9.6%

Price parity and difference against Santa Maria are in the full table on wider screens.

Fig. 2 — Five-year trend

Nominal against real

The same median, once as published and once restated in 2025 dollars.

100k120k140k 20212022202320242025
Nominal, as published Real, in 2025 dollars US$ thousands

Published pay rose 19.7% over the five years to 2025. Adjusted for inflation it is roughly flat — industrial engineers in Santa Maria earn about what they earned in 2021. The two lines meet at the right edge by construction, since 2025 is the base year.

Sources

How this page was made

Wage data
Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 release. Public domain.
Price parity
Bureau of Economic Analysis, Regional Price Parities, 2024.
Inflation
Real figures deflate by CPI-U annual averages (BLS, all items, US city average).
Employment
380 employed in this occupation in the metro (BLS estimate; excludes the self-employed).
Occupation
SOC 17-2112, Industrial Engineers. Mapped to our taxonomy as industrial-engineers.

Percentiles are reported exactly as released and are never interpolated between published values. We take no payment from employers, recruiters or anyone else for how any figure is presented.