Design ships. Hulls, stability, structure and propulsion, for the Navy, shipyards and offshore industry.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Typical
$112,230
Graduate engineer
$83,010
Senior or principal
$173,330
The national median is $112,230 a year, the bottom tenth start near $83,010 and the top tenth reach $173,330. The survey counts marine engineers and naval architects together because the two jobs sit side by side on the same projects: the naval architect shapes the ship, the marine engineer designs what drives it.
$83,000 to $95,000
Graduate engineer at a shipyard, design firm or federal agency
This is one of the highest starting salaries of any engineering field, mostly because there are very few graduates. Federal civilian jobs at the Navy pay on the General Schedule, the government pay scale, and come with a pension.
$140,000 to $173,000
Top tenth of the occupation
Offshore energy, defense contractors and classification societies pay at the top. Roles that carry legal sign-off on a design pay more again, and those usually want a professional engineer license.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
Webb Institute, a private college that teaches only naval architecture and marine engineering, gives every enrolled United States citizen or permanent resident a full tuition scholarship, so the low end is fees, books and the Fundamentals of Engineering exam. It takes about 30 students a year, so that door is very hard to walk through. The high end is the normal route: a four year engineering degree at a public university at in-state rates of $12,000 to $16,000 a year, the Fundamentals of Engineering exam, and later the Principles and Practice of Engineering exam at around $425 plus your state board's own charges. The maritime academies and the Navy also pay tuition in exchange for a service commitment.
File the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid). Engineering schools also award scholarships, and the maritime academies and the Navy run programs that pay tuition in exchange for a service commitment.
Federal benefits if you work for the Navy
Health insurance, a pension and predictable pay steps on the government scale.
Sea trials and yard visits
Travel to shipyards and out on the water, paid for by the employer.
Security clearance
Common in defense work, and a clearance makes you harder to replace and better paid.
Tuition help for a master's degree
Large employers routinely pay for graduate study in hydrodynamics or structures.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
A four year engineering degree, then years of real design work. Very few schools teach it.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Calculus, physics, chemistry and computer science. Sailing, rowing or building boats is genuinely useful context.
Bachelor's degree
4 years
Naval architecture and marine engineering, or mechanical or ocean engineering. Fewer than a dozen schools in the country run the dedicated program.
Fundamentals of Engineering exam
One exam
Sit it in your final year while the math is fresh. Passing makes you an engineer in training and starts the clock on licensure.
Work under licensed engineers
4 years
Four years of design experience at a shipyard, design firm, classification society or federal agency.
Professional engineer license, if you want it
One exam
The NCEES (National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying) offers a Principles and Practice of Engineering exam in naval architecture and marine engineering. Your state board issues the license.
Calculus and physics
Fluid mechanics and structures are built directly on both.
Computer science
Modern ship design is modeling, simulation and scripting.
Drafting or design technology
You will live in three dimensional modeling software.
Anything on the water
Sailing, rowing, a summer at a boatyard. It builds intuition the math alone does not.
Engineering licensure in the United States runs through state boards. You pass the Fundamentals of Engineering exam, work about four years under licensed engineers, then sit the Principles and Practice of Engineering exam, which exists in a naval architecture and marine engineering version. Most naval architects never need the license, because work done inside a shipyard or a manufacturer falls under an exemption in most states. You do need it if you want to run a consultancy, stamp drawings or sign off designs for a client, so plenty of engineers take it anyway to keep the option open.
This is a small field and the school list is short, which is part of why graduates are paid well.
Webb Institute
New York. Every student studies naval architecture and marine engineering, every student gets a full-tuition scholarship, and there are two months of paid internship every year.
United States Naval Academy and the Coast Guard Academy
Free education in exchange for a commissioned service obligation.
State maritime academies
Massachusetts, New York, Maine, California, Texas and Michigan, several with naval architecture or marine engineering degrees.
Large public universities
The University of Michigan, the University of New Orleans and Virginia Tech among others run programs in the field.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Hydrodynamics
Resistance, propulsion and seakeeping. Heavy computational fluid dynamics work, usually a master's degree.
Structural analysis
Finite element modeling of hulls under load, and the core of classification society work.
Offshore and subsea
Floating platforms, wind foundations and installation vessels. The best paid corner of the field.
Submarines and naval combatants
Defense work, a clearance, and long stable programs.
A security clearance
Needed for most Navy work, and once you have one you are in a much smaller hiring pool.
Programming
Python and scripting inside design and analysis packages saves weeks of manual work.
Time at sea
A summer on a working vessel changes how you design one.
Student membership in a professional society
The Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers runs student chapters, scholarships and a job board.
The Navy and the Coast Guard are among the largest employers of naval architects in the country, both as civilian engineers and as commissioned officers. Civilian jobs are posted on the federal hiring site, pay on the General Schedule, the government pay scale, and come with a pension and predictable raises. They are also one of the few places you get handed responsibility for a real ship design early, because the programs are enormous and long running.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Mostly a desk, a large screen and a hull model. Run a stability calculation for a new loading condition, check a structural drawing against class rules, answer a shipyard's question about a bracket that does not fit. A design review meeting where six disciplines argue about the same 200 millimeters of space. Every few months you go to the yard, walk the actual ship, and find out what your drawing looks like in steel.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Webb Institute in New York teaches one subject, naval architecture and marine engineering, awards a full-tuition scholarship to every enrolled student who is a citizen or permanent resident, guarantees two months of internship a year, and reports full placement of its graduates.
A ship floats because of where its weight sits relative to where the buoyancy pushes. Naval architects spend their careers on that relationship, and nearly every famous maritime disaster comes back to it in some form.
Organizations such as the American Bureau of Shipping write the structural rules that commercial ships are built to, and inspect them for decades afterward. A large share of naval architecture jobs sit inside or around those societies.
The Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers counts roughly 4,000 members across 95 countries. In a field that size, your reputation travels ahead of you and a bad project follows you around.
Last checked September 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.