USA Semiconductors & Hardware Industry Salary Report 2026

Median pay by role runs from $51,344 for cleanroom and manufacturing technicians to $188,850 for SoC and chip architects, a spread of about 268%. That is the widest role spread in this report series by a long way, and it is the first thing to understand about any single semiconductor pay figure: one industry heading covers two different labour markets. Design and verification sits at the top. SoC and chip architects lead at $188,850, then DFT engineers at $183,650, ASIC design at $175,000, physical design at $170,000, RTL design at $163,000 and design verification at $162,750. Embedded systems is $160,000, analog and mixed-signal $157,340, firmware $155,000 and silicon validation $150,000. Below the market median the work moves to the fab and the facility. Advanced packaging is $148,800 and RF engineering $147,000, level with the overall median. Hardware engineering is $140,400, process engineering $121,000, equipment engineering $106,849, EHS management $86,400 and cleanroom technicians $51,344. Read the two blocks separately. The feed carries no posting count per role, so treat the exact ordering as directional.

New York leads states at $165,000, 0.2% ahead of California at $164,600, with Washington third at $157,600. North Carolina follows at $149,800, Texas at $146,000, Colorado at $140,400, Massachusetts at $130,000, Arizona at $129,500 and Oregon lowest at $128,880. The state spread of about 28% is the narrowest in this series. The ordering is worth reading against the role table. The states carrying the most US fabrication capacity sit at the bottom of it: Oregon and Arizona are the two lowest of the nine. Cities say the same. San Jose tops the list at $174,650, then Irvine at $158,535, Austin at $157,450, Redmond at $153,575, Santa Clara at $152,100, San Diego at $151,880, Phoenix at $142,860 and Hillsboro lowest at $124,920, a city spread of about 40%. Hillsboro and Phoenix are both large fab locations and both sit below the market median. That is consistent with the role mix rather than with a geographic discount: process, equipment and technician roles carry lower medians wherever they are posted, and they are concentrated where the fabs are. State medians pool metro and non-metro postings unevenly, so read both cuts as directional.

Across the months with enough disclosed pay to report, the posted median moves from $157,430 in February to $138,291 in July, a shift of about 12%. Read that as a change in what was posted, not as a change in what semiconductor engineers are paid. Only 42.5% of postings disclose a range, and with design and manufacturing roles in the same feed the monthly mix moves the median on its own. A month heavy in equipment and process postings prints lower than a month heavy in chip design, with no underlying pay movement at all. Three months are suppressed for thin disclosed data: January at roughly 28 disclosed ranges, May at 82 and August at 71, all under the floor of 100 we apply before publishing a monthly point. That removes both ends of the series, so the visible line runs February to July. May is thin for a familiar reason, a May 2026 volume trough that appears in every industry pull we have run this year. Read the overall level rather than any single month.

Two figures in this section come from Glozo data that public salary sources do not publish. Against 2,726 active postings, the feed carries a measured talent pool of 59,514 semiconductor and hardware professionals in the United States. Divide one by the other and there are about 22 available professionals for every open role. That places this market in the middle of the series rather than at the scarce end. Our cloud and infrastructure report puts 92,250 people against 6,761 active postings, about 14 per opening. Cybersecurity puts 119,998 against 7,865, about 15. Banking is about 29 and recruiting about 48. Semiconductors sits level with revenue operations at about 22. Postings clear in 9.8 days on average, with a spread of just under eight days across the seventeen roles. Cleanroom and manufacturing technician roles stay open longest at 15.3 days, then advanced packaging at 13.7 and SoC architecture at 12.2. Silicon validation closes fastest at 7.5 days, with ASIC design at 7.9 and embedded systems at 8.1. Across all seventeen roles pay and time to fill run mildly inverse, a Pearson correlation of -0.50. Almost all of that comes from one row: cleanroom technicians are both the lowest paid and the longest open. Remove them and the correlation falls to -0.15, which is no relationship worth reporting. The honest reading is that time to fill in this market is flat across pay levels, with one exception at the bottom of the pay table.

Full-time work accounts for 91.5% of postings. Contract roles are 6.3%, internships 1.6%, part-time 0.4% and temporary work 0.2%. The full-time share is close to our cloud and infrastructure report at 91.4% and cybersecurity at 91.7%, and well above recruiting at 82.0%. Employers treat semiconductor and hardware work as standing in-house capability rather than as project work, which fits an employer list led by chip makers and equipment vendors. The internship share of 1.6% is roughly double the 0.8% in cloud and the 0.9% in cybersecurity. Set that next to the talent pool below, which is 1.7% entry level: the postings side runs a wider formal entry route into this industry than the measured pool yet reflects.

Skill premiums here are modest and closely bunched. Synopsys EDA leads at 9.1%, then TCL at 8.0%, RTL design at 7.2%, Verilog at 6.8%, SystemVerilog at 6.0%, Cadence EDA at 3.9% and Python at 3.8%. The level is the first finding. The largest premium in this report is 9.1%, against 18% for Kubernetes in our cloud report and 18.6% for AI security in cybersecurity. No single named skill moves semiconductor pay the way one skill does in those markets. The ordering is the second. TCL, a scripting language attached to EDA tool flows rather than to chip design itself, is priced above both Verilog and SystemVerilog. Six of the seven skills belong to the design flow and only Python is general purpose. Taken with the role table, what carries a premium is a position in that flow rather than any one language, and the flow is priced almost uniformly across its parts.

The measured pool is 59,514 professionals, smaller than every industry in this series except revenue operations, and it concentrates in the middle. Specialists are 66.2% of it and experts 28.6%, so almost 95% of measured professionals sit in those two tiers. Leaders are 3.5%, or 2,070 people. Entry level is 1.7%, or 1,024 people, second only to cloud at 1.6% as the thinnest entry layer we have measured. Posted pay follows the same shape. The ladder runs $82,900 at entry, $132,500 for specialists, $168,100 for experts and $220,920 for leaders, a range of about 2.7 times. The step from entry to specialist is 59.8%, gentler than the 94.1% in our cloud report, and the specialist median sits 9.9% below the overall market median. The practical reading for anyone hiring is arithmetic. There are about a thousand measured entry-level professionals in the country against 2,726 active postings. Whatever the volume of openings, the junior layer is not where they get filled.

The gender pay figures here come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, not from Glozo postings. For architecture and engineering occupations, the 2025 annual averages give a median of $104,364 for men and $85,748 for women, a gap of 17.8%. The national gap across all occupations is 19.4%. Two limits are worth stating plainly. The BLS occupation group is much broader than semiconductor and hardware work, and its medians sit below the posted medians elsewhere in this report, so the two sets of numbers describe different populations and should not be read against each other. Glozo does not collect gender data on candidates or on postings, so no other figure in this report is broken out by gender.