According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the employment of nuclear engineers will be decreased by 4% during the period between 2014 and 2024, which means that there will be about 700 less opened job positions by the end of 2024. But since this job is very well paid, Insider Monkey managed to find out what 15 best states for nuclear engineers are.
If you ever read some of our or Insider Monkey’s previous articles, you might have noticed that for each career there are 25 best states. But since the situation with nuclear engineering is what it is, they had to reduce this number for 10 places. Just to get out of the box a bit, you should know that Virginia is still having the most job opportunities for nuclear engineers, followed by Washington and Pennsylvania.
The nuclear engineering is very important for the whole humanity, which is why the salary of nuclear engineers is so high. The average salary that was found on the US Bureau of Labor Statistics was $102,220 on the annual basis, which means that the nuclear engineers are paid about $49.14 per an hour. But since this number is the result of all states in the US, you can be sure that, although some states are offering the higher salary than $102,220, there are also some that are paying only $65,570 to nuclear engineers. Luckily for everyone in this business, there are only 10% of nuclear engineers with this low salary, while the 10% of the highest paid ones are earning about $152,420.
As a nuclear engineer, you have the opportunity to work in several areas. For example, the majority of nuclear engineers are working in Electric Power Generation, Transmission and Distribution Industry, while about 17% work for Federal Government and 16% are in Scientific Research and Development Services.
Before we go on to the original article, let’s explain their methodology. States are ranked based on the IM Score, which is the overall score of the combination of three parameters: as always, there is the annual median wage, found on the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the cost of living index, from Missouri Economy. But since I already mentioned that the employment in this area is dropping, as the third parameter Insider Monkey research team took the job growth and the list was ready to go.
Without further ado, here is the list of 15 best states for nuclear engineers.