Design the chips, boards and machines that software runs on.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Counsellors: send it to a student from your own email in one click.
Programs in the fields this career usually comes through. Each has its own page: what it takes to get in, the courses you need and what it costs.
The median pay is about $161,740 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $92,940 at the lower end to about $225,330 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
4 to 6 years after high school, on the usual route.
$30,000 to $200,000 all in for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.
No. There is no license to hold, though many employers still ask for training or a certificate.
Very high demand nationally, from government outlook data. Demand varies by region, so check your area.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$161,740
Bottom tenth
$92,940
Top tenth
$225,330
The national median is $161,740 a year, the bottom tenth earn $92,940 or less and the top tenth $225,330 or more (2025 federal wage survey). These figures are published for Computer Hardware Engineers, the closest survey title to this job. People who call themselves computer engineers but write software are counted under software developer instead, and that occupation pays less at the median: $135,980 in 2025.
$92,940 to $126,090
The bottom tenth and bottom quarter of computer hardware engineers, 2025
A first job out of a four year engineering degree usually sits in this part of the range. Where you work moves this a long way. California, Texas, Oregon and Massachusetts are home to many of the chip and device employers. Defense contractors hire steadily and can sponsor a security clearance, which opens other jobs later.
$185,180 a year
The median for computer hardware engineers in California, the highest of any state
Washington State ($169,120) and Massachusetts ($167,600) come next. Mississippi is the lowest, at $78,320. At large technology companies a big part of senior pay is company stock, which is not counted the same way in a wage survey. Total compensation at the top can run well beyond the published number, and it can also fall when the share price does.
Roughly, all in
$30,000 to $200,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is two years at a community college at about $4,000 a year, then transferring into a four year engineering program at an in state public university, which is a real and common route. The high end is four years out of state or at a private university at around $50,000 a year before any aid. Paid internships and co op terms are normal in engineering, which takes a genuine bite out of the debt, and the sticker price at expensive schools is rarely what a student with need actually pays after aid.
Paid internships and co-op programs are normal in engineering and often pay $25 to $45 an hour, which takes a real bite out of the debt.
Company stock
Restricted shares that vest over several years are standard at large technology employers.
Health insurance and a retirement match
Full benefits are the norm, not the exception, in this field.
Paid tuition for a master's degree
Many employers will pay for a graduate degree while you keep working.
Relocation and signing bonuses
Chip companies compete hard for new graduates and pay to move you.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
A four year engineering degree is the door. There is no way around it in hardware.
High school with heavy math and physics
Grade 12
Calculus and physics are the entry requirements for almost every engineering school.
Bachelor of science in computer engineering
4 years
Pick a program accredited by ABET (the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology), which is what employers and licensing boards recognize.
Internships or a co-op
Summers, or a full year
One or two paid summers inside a real company. This is what turns a degree into a job offer.
First engineering job
1 to 2 years
Junior design, verification or test engineer. You learn the company's tools for a year before you are trusted with your own block of the design.
Master's degree, if you want chip design
1 to 2 more years
Optional for most roles, close to expected for advanced semiconductor and processor design work.
Calculus
Non negotiable. Engineering programs start where high school calculus ends.
Physics
Electricity and magnetism are the foundation of everything you will design.
Computer science
You will write code every week, even on the hardware side.
Electronics or robotics club
Building things badly and fixing them is the best preparation there is.
Nobody has to be licensed to design a circuit board, so most computer engineers never get a professional license at all. The route exists if you want it. You take the FE (Fundamentals of Engineering) exam near the end of your degree, a 110 question test that costs about $225, then work about four years under a licensed engineer and sit the PE (Principles and Practice of Engineering) exam, which is around $425 in most states plus your state board's own fee. Licensing is done state by state. It matters most if you end up signing off on work for the public, in power systems, buildings or safety critical control.
Accredited computer engineering programs exist in every state. A few well known ones.
Purdue University, Indiana
Offers a separate bachelor of science in computer engineering alongside electrical engineering.
Georgia Institute of Technology
A large electrical and computer engineering school.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Deep semiconductor and computer architecture research.
Your own state's flagship university
In-state tuition at an accredited program gets you the same first job for a fraction of the money.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Digital design and verification
Writing hardware description code and proving a chip works before it is built. Always short of people.
Embedded systems and firmware
The code that runs on the chip itself. The widest job market in hardware.
Semiconductor process and packaging
How chips are actually manufactured. New American fabrication plants are hiring for this.
Security clearance
Defense work requires it, takes months to obtain, and makes you hard to replace.
Machine learning hardware
Designing accelerators for AI (artificial intelligence) workloads is the hottest corner of the field right now.
Personal projects you can show
A microcontroller board you designed and had made says more than a transcript.
Soldering and lab instruments
Being useful in a lab on day one gets you the interesting work early.
Programming in C and Python
Hardware engineers write test scripts and low level code constantly.
Student engineering competitions
Robotics, solar car and rocketry teams are direct recruiting grounds.
People use the words computer engineer for two fairly different careers. One designs physical things: processors, boards, sensors and the firmware that drives them. The other writes software and just happens to have an engineering degree. The hardware side is smaller, has a higher median, $161,740 against $135,980 for software developers in 2025, needs the degree and cannot be learned from a short course. The software side has far more openings and more ways in. A computer engineering degree qualifies you for both, which is a real part of its value.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Most of the day is at a screen, in design and simulation tools, not at a workbench. You read specifications, write or review the description of a block of logic, then run simulations overnight and spend the morning working out why one of them failed. There is a stand up meeting with your team and often a long one with the software group about who is going to fix a problem that sits between them. When silicon or boards come back from the factory, you move into the lab with instruments and hunt for the difference between what you designed and what you got.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
O*NET OnLine (the Department of Labor's occupation database) counted about 76,100 computer hardware engineers in 2025. It projects growth of 7 percent or more by 2035, much faster than average, with about 4,100 openings a year.
Once a processor design is sent to the factory, correcting an error means a new set of masks and another run of wafers. That is why verification engineers, the people who try to break a design before it is built, are paid as well as the people who design it.
Federal funding has pushed a wave of new semiconductor plants in Arizona, Texas, Ohio and New York. They need engineers and technicians in places that had almost none of this work ten years ago.
ABET (the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) accredits nearly 5,000 programs at about 950 institutions worldwide. An unaccredited engineering degree can block you from sitting licensing exams later, so check before you enroll.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Engineers first, then the rest of the field. See every career in engineering.
Last checked October 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in United States dollars, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published pay scales. They vary by state, employer and experience. Tuition is for in-state students at public schools unless the card says otherwise. How every figure on this site is sourced and checked.
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