In this issue
- Average pay fell in a year the average ranked integrator grew 30%
- Why integrators stopped worrying about talent, and what it’s cost them
- The graduate engineering market collapsed, and automation was the exception
- The tenure band where the pay curve sags, and who’s already noticed
- A ten minute way to check your number is still the market
The year the money arrived and the pay went down
Control Engineering’s 2026 Career and Salary Survey opens with four words. “Benefits and salaries decreased.”
Average base pay across respondents came in at $117,395, down 1.9% on the $119,682 reported a year earlier, and average bonus fell from $18,595 to $16,315. With CPI running at 3.8% that’s a real terms cut of something like five and a half percent. In the very same survey, 42% named a lack of skilled workers as the leading threat to their business.
I’ve read that twice a week since June and it still doesn’t reconcile, because you can’t have a genuine shortage of something and a falling price for it at the same time. What you get instead is what Automation World found, 37% of organizations sitting in a hiring freeze while 58% say they can’t fill their roles, which is a lot of firms deciding they’d rather leave the seat empty than raise the offer.
So whatever we’re describing here isn’t a shortage of engineers, it’s a shortage of engineers at the number firms are currently willing to pay, which is a much better problem to have, incidentally, because a demographic cliff takes fifteen years to fix and a band takes an afternoon.
The integrator side of the ledger makes it worse rather than better. Revenue on the System Integrator Giants list rose 86% between 2021 and 2025, and the 2026 list came in at $4.67 billion across 75 firms, up roughly 18%, with average revenue per ranked firm up about 30%. The shape of who earns it changed too, with firms turning over more than $100 million going from 12% of that list to 24%, while the share at or below $25 million fell from 60% to 39%. So the money went up and it concentrated at the top of the table, which is the squeeze a lot of mid sized generalist shops have been feeling and putting down to bad luck.
And look at how that growth was actually produced, because over the same window the average number of automation and control engineers assigned to one integrator’s projects went from 105 to 168, a 60% jump against 86% revenue growth. The industry grew by putting more people on the job, it didn’t grow by paying them more.
So why didn’t the bands move? My read is that they didn’t have to and the integrators’ own survey answers agree. On that 2026 list, “the economy’s impact on the automation integrator market” is now the single biggest named concern at 27%, having roughly tripled across three reporting cycles, while “staffing, quality of young engineers” sits at 13% and has actually fallen back on the year before. Talent anxiety in this industry peaked a cycle ago and demand anxiety replaced it, and a business worried about where the next project is coming from doesn’t go looking for reasons to raise its salary bands.
There’s a group carrying most of the cost of that and it isn’t the one you’d guess. Review the previous year’s fuller Control Engineering salary report by tenure and pay peaks at around $132,000 for engineers ten to fourteen years in with the same employer, then drops to roughly $101,600 for those twenty to twenty four years in. So the most loyal and most experienced people in the building are the worst paid relative to what they actually do, and every recruiter in this market knows it, because those are the easiest calls we make.
Graduate engineering hiring in America has fallen through the floor at the same time, with LinkedIn data given to Forbes last month putting new graduate hiring down 20% between December 2019 and April 2026, and engineering majors down 25%, the largest fall of the twenty most common majors, with aerospace and chemical engineering both down 26%. Engineering stopped being the safe degree.
Except in one corner: the same piece notes that hiring for field engineers is up on pre pandemic levels, and that automation engineering “is another area where hiring is up from pre-pandemic levels”, so the collapse is in engineering broadly, it isn’t in ours.
That aligns with what I’m seeing daily, where the bulk of the vacancies coming through sit in the three to seven year band, people not that long out of college who don’t cost a fortune and are still moldable. A talent lead at a large national integrator put the same thing to me more bluntly, that on paper everybody wants the fifteen year person, and then they show up and what the business actually wanted was the seven year person with the energy and the attitude.
So there’s a window, and I don’t think it stays open. Aerospace and chemical and mechanical graduates are available right now, at a price, who wouldn’t have returned your call in 2022, and the corner of engineering they’d be walking into is the one still growing.
Cost it honestly before anyone gets excited though, because Bill Mueller at Lucid Automation published the real arithmetic on this, twenty to twenty five thousand dollars over a three month internship and twelve to eighteen months to break even, running at roughly 70% attrition on those interns. Seven in ten leave, and if that number isn’t in the business case somebody has put in front of you, then you need to take another look.
What I notice from here
I’m not sitting inside one of these businesses and I’m not going to pretend I know how to run one, but I do spend most of my week on the phone to both sides of this, so here’s what I notice from where I sit.
- Almost every search I see stall is stalling on a number that got set a couple of years ago and never revisited, and I’d argue the gap between that number and the market isn’t a saving anyone made, it’s a resignation that hasn’t happened yet.
- Ten to twenty years in is where that pay curve sags and it’s also where the deepest knowledge in most businesses sits, and they’re the easiest conversations I have all week. Firms watch the top and they watch the graduates, and the middle just gets on with it.
- The firms coming out of a soft graduate market well don’t seem to be the ones announcing schemes, they’re the ones taking a single person who can’t do the job yet but demonstrates the right qualities and finding out what happens.
- Anyone building a bench on the assumption they’ll keep everybody is going to shut it down in year two and decide the model was wrong, when the only thing wrong with it was the forecast.
And if you’re the engineer reading this rather than the person signing the offers, the same numbers point somewhere different. Your profession’s average pay went backwards this year, so sitting tight and waiting for the market to correct it isn’t a plan. Tenure won’t do it either, given where that curve sags. The lever is a move, or a specialism thin enough that the band has to bend, and the thin ones right now are the ones almost nobody is graduating into.
Worth reading this fortnight
- Control Engineering, 2026 Career and Salary Survey. Average base down 1.9% to $117,395 and average bonus down to $16,315, in the same survey where 42% of respondents called skilled labor the biggest threat to their business, which is the most damning pair of numbers published in this industry all year. Control Engineering, 8 June 2026.
- Jake Hall. Six hundred thousand open manufacturing jobs, framed around the argument that there’s a way in whatever route you took, and he’s right about the route, though that six hundred thousand is a trade body figure and the official BLS count is materially lower, which is worth knowing before you repeat it anywhere it’ll be checked. LinkedIn, August 2026.
- Automation World, Salary and Career Survey. Eighty two percent of automation professionals say they’re satisfied and seventy five percent would still take the call, which ought to finish off the idea that an engagement score tells you anything at all about who’s on the way out, and if you’re the one taking the call, three quarters of the people you work with are doing exactly the same. Automation World, 18 March 2026.
Ten minutes to find out if your number is still the market
This is something I actually do all day, so it’s the one thing I can hand you with a straight face. Pull up the three or four live adverts closest to the role you care about, and I mean ones posted in the last month rather than the ones sat there since spring, then write down the ranges. Add ten to fifteen percent to the top of each, because an advertised range is what a firm hopes to pay and not what it ends up paying for the person it actually wants. Now put your own number next to that. And if you turned anybody down on money in the last six months, or turned a role down yourself, put what they said next to it too, because a real decline is worth more than any survey I could send you, mine included (though if you ask nicely, there is some data I can share).
You’ll usually find you’re either fine, or you’re about eight percent light and have been for a while.
Two questions that go with it:
- When did a band in your business last move because the work had changed, rather than because somebody resigned?
- Of the engineers you’d genuinely struggle to replace, how many of them know that you’d struggle?
On my desk
I’m looking for a process controls engineer for an integrator in the south central belt, DCS first with Experion and ABB 800xA the sweet spot, a hundred and forty to a hundred and eighty on base. Their travel model is weekly rather than project length, out Monday and home Friday, so nobody there is getting in a car and disappearing for two months, and they’ll look at a discrete automation crossover if the process instinct is there.
Alongside it there’s a manufacturing intelligence architect role built on Ignition, coastal North Carolina or north Louisiana, base plus a year end profit share, for a business that would rather develop someone into the platform than wait around for a finished resume to appear.
And on the contract side I’ve got live pharma work in North Carolina, Rockwell and DeltaV, plus a pair of greenfield commissioning seats near New Orleans where the end client needs a strong communicator with Rockwell experience who can manage electrical contractors.
Jon
