Robotics engineer salary: what the $122,930 figure actually measures

Salary figures for robotics roles vary wildly online because at least three different occupations get called robotics jobs, and none of them is robotics on its own. The $122,930 belongs to Engineers, All Other. Robotics technicians are reported inside a mechatronics category at about $73,900. Industrial machinery mechanics, who do most hands-on robot maintenance, are at $64,520. Quote any one without naming what it measures and you are roughly doubling or halving the answer.

A residual category is a weaker basis than a broad one, and the difference is worth keeping straight. Engineers, All Other is not 'engineering, which includes robotics'. It is the set of engineering occupations left over once BLS has broken out the ones large enough to name. Robotics engineers are somewhere inside it, but so is a long tail of unrelated engineering work, and nothing in the published data says what share is which.

The pay gap and the job count run in opposite directions. Engineering pays roughly double maintenance, while maintenance employs more than two and a half times as many people and projects about five times the annual openings over the same 2025 to 2035 period. A reader asking about money and a reader asking about opportunity need different figures.

Attach the label to the number. The defensible form is 'O*NET reports a $122,930 median for Engineers, All Other, the category containing robotics engineers,' not 'robotics engineers earn $122,930.'

Treat the 166,700 employment and 8,800 annual openings the same way. They size Engineers, All Other, not the robotics workforce, and no published figure sizes the robotics workforce on its own.

Pair the wage with the openings figure if the question is career advice. Engineering pays more; maintenance has far more projected openings each year.

Use the hourly figure when you need a rate rather than an annual salary. It is the same underlying data.

Reporting $122,930 as the robotics engineer median full stop. It is the median for Engineers, All Other, and O*NET says so on the page the figure comes from.

Reading 166,700 as the number of robotics engineers in the US. That is the size of the residual engineering category, and the robotics share of it is not published.

Quoting one robotics salary without saying which occupation. The plausible answers range from about $64,520 to $122,930 depending on the role.

Treating engineer and technician as interchangeable. They are different occupations with roughly a two-to-one pay gap.

Assuming the highest-paying role also has the most openings. Maintenance projects about five times the annual openings at roughly half the pay.

Both occupations come from O*NET summaries republishing Bureau of Labor Statistics 2025 wage and employment data and 2025 to 2035 projections. We retrieved both pages and confirmed each figure appears in their text.

We also verified the label rather than assuming it. O*NET's Robotics Engineers summary states 'Median wage data for Engineers, All Other', and repeats the same attribution for its employment and industry data. That string is cited as a figure on this page so the caveat is evidenced rather than asserted, and so the citation gate re-checks it whenever O*NET changes.

We cite O*NET rather than BLS directly because BLS publishes no page to cite for this occupation. The Occupational Outlook Handbook covers named engineering occupations and carries no entry for Engineers, All Other, the residual code these figures belong to. O*NET republishes the same BLS figures in a form our citation check can fetch and confirm. The numbers are BLS data either way.

We present engineering and maintenance together deliberately. The two are routinely conflated in salary coverage, and the comparison is the part a reader cannot easily assemble.

There is no robotics-only occupation in the government statistical system, so no figure on this page is a pure robotics wage. An earlier version of this page said that in its body while its headline and table still presented the figures as robotics-specific. The labels now carry the caveat.

O*NET's "Projected job openings (2025-2035)" heading reads like a ten-year total. It is not. BLS publishes occupational openings as an annual average across the projection period, and the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook words the same figures as openings projected each year, on average, over the decade. One occupation makes the check concrete: O*NET lists 40,300 openings for welders under its 2025-2035 heading, and the Handbook describes that identical 40,300 as a yearly figure. We report these openings as annual averages for that reason, and flag it because O*NET's label invites the opposite reading.

Refreshed in October 2026 for the 2025 to 2035 projections. The previous version reported 158,800 employed and about 9,300 openings a year for Engineers, All Other, and 439,600 employed and about 45,700 openings a year for industrial machinery mechanics.