High paying engineering and architecture jobs in Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN

Every engineering and architecture occupation below is ranked by its median annual wage in Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN. Read the percentile range, not just the median: the gap between the 10th and 90th inside a single engineering and architecture job is usually wider than the gap between two different ones, so where you land in a field matters more than which field you pick.

Cost of living: prices in Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN run 3.6% above the national average (2024), so a Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN salary is worth about 0.97× its face value in national terms. That scales every wage here by the same factor — it changes what the numbers mean, not their order.

Local wage estimates are suppressed more often than state ones — BLS withholds any figure too few local employers report — so an occupation missing here simply has no published local estimate.

Wages: BLS OEWS, May 2025 · Cost of living: BEA regional price parities, 2024

Ranked among the occupations common enough to employ roughly one in every three thousand workers in Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN. The rarer ones are real jobs — but a 1,190-person occupation at the top of a list answers a different question than the one most readers are asking.