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It’s that time of year again. Read our new 2025 audio engineer salaries and jobs report!
Want to know what audio engineer salaries are like, and where the best prospects of employment are?
We’re diving into the data once again and analyzing the trends around audio jobs and income for 2025.
This is a field continues to be dominated by freelance and independent contractor work, rather than by traditional salaried employment, and we’ll be drawing on both sets of data to give you a fuller picture of what the jobs are like, and where you can find them.
Below, we’ll go into all the juicy details, but first a note on how this data is compiled.
Where does this data come from?
Each spring, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases its latest job numbers, which they collected in May of the previous year.
The main figures we’ll look at today come from their “Occupational Employment Statistics” (OES) survey, a questionnaire for businesses about the workers they employ.
The one big drawback of this survey is that it only tracks employees, and not independent contractors, so it leaves out more jobs than it includes. Still, this data goes very deep and can help give us a good sense for overall trends.
As always, we’ll supplement this report with numbers from the Current Population Survey (CPS). While this survey is done less frequently and at a smaller scale, the CPS tracks the responses of individual workers in phone interviews, helping to account for freelancers and the self-employed.
How many jobs are there?
The first time we explored these numbers, way back in 2012, we found that despite all the stories of major studio closings, the number of jobs for “sound engineering technicians” actually increased by nearly 50% during the first decade of the 21st century.
The most recent projections from the BLS going forward are for a slowing rate of growth, projected to be 3% job growth for “broadcast, sound and video technicians” and 5% job growth for “sound engineering technicians”. This is down dramatically from our 2023 report, when future growth projections were closer to 10%.
As for as the total number of conventional jobs in the field, the OES survey of employers counts 13,050 salaried “sound engineering technicians” in the entire country. This is down about 3% compared to our 2023 report. (And down roughly 13% from its peak in 2017.)
But this OES data only tells a very small part of the story. It leaves out freelancers, which are probably a much larger portion of those working in the field, and are growing in number at a rate that more than offsets the loss of salaried workers.
The most recent estimate from the CPS survey—which includes freelancers—puts the number of people working as “broadcast, sound and video technicians” at 146,100, which is up 22% since our last report, and its highest level yet. When we look at the subset of just “sound engineering technicians” their estimates appear to be up 10% over the prior year.
This government data isn’t perfect, it’s constantly being revised after the fact, and the differences in job categories from one survey to another aren’t clearly defined. So as always, take it with a grain of salt.
My own estimate based on the data I have available, and on informal surveys I’ve collected, suggest that there may be as many as 5 to 8 freelancers or self-employed audio workers for for every 1 formally salaried employee in audio.
How much do these jobs pay?
This year, the OEWS estimate for the average salary for audio engineers is $79,280, which is up from $65,000 in 2019 and $75,590 in 2023. This is up 22% over the past 6 years.
Unfortunately, this is increase lags behind the official cumulative inflation rate of roughly 26% over the same period!
(…And if we know anything about inflation, it’s the governments have clear incentives to underplay just how much of it they have caused each year.)
As usual, the average salary is higher than the median salary. This year, the CPS data puts the median income for the field at $66,400.
This difference is because the engineers who earn more than the median can earn a lot more than the median. However, this difference has been starting to compress in the past several years, with wages at the bottom growing much more quickly than at the top.
In the latest data, the top 10% of earners in the field commanded average salaries of $134,980, which is actually a drop of a half a percent from 2023, and up about 15% since 2019.
Meanwhile the bottom 10% earned about $36,600 in the latest reports—up 17% since 2023, and up a whopping 40% from our 2019 report.
Where are the jobs, by state?
Once again, there has been a trend of audio engineers leaving more expensive cities for more affordable locales.
Between 2012 and 2023, there was a massive exodus of engineers from New York to then much less expensive California. This was then followed by an equally shocking exodus from California to even lower cost states over the past two years.
New York and California together once used to make up a combined total of about 50% of the total market for salaried audio jobs, split about evenly between them. Today, that figure is down to a new low of 42%.
This represents a sharp decline from 48% just two years ago, with all of that loss coming from California.
As recently as our 2023 report, California commanded 37% of the market by itself. Today it is down to 29% of the total market. This represents a loss of 22% of its share of audio engineers in just two years.
This change mirrors a larger national trend throughout the economy, in which workers have been steadily migrating out of high-cost, high-tax states and into low-cost, low-tax states.
Until now, the most dramatic contrast I’d seen since I began following these numbers had been the exodus for engineers from New York to California between 2010 and 2023. But this trend appears to have stopped.
As the cost differences between New York and California have begun to stabilize, we are starting to witness a meaningful uptick in the proportion of engineers in New York for the first time in more than a decade.
After about 15 years of steady decline from the top spot, New York finally saw a a slight increase from a low of 11% of the total job market in 2023 to about 13% today.
Of course, this is still is a far cry from 15 years ago, when New York commanded almost a quarter of the audio job market by itself.
Between 2011 and 2018, the ratio of sound technician jobs in California vs New York went from about equal, to California audio engineers outnumbering New York audio engineers by roughly 2.6 to 1. By 2023, the ratio had reached over 3.3 California audio engineers for every 1 New York audio engineer.
Today, as the affordability gap of living in New York vs California has begun to close after mass exoduses from New York, we are finally seeing that trend begin to reverse. The ratio has quickly closed back to 2:4 to 1—the lowest job disparity we’ve seen in almost a decade.
In terms of the sheer number of jobs, after the behemoths of New York and California came The much smaller markets of Florida, Illinois, and Tennessee. These were followed by the even smaller markets of Ohio, Washington, New Jersey, Texas and Utah. Each of them are responsible for about 2% to 6% of the total audio engineering market today, with Florida in the lead.
Where are the jobs by city?
We can get even more granular than this and look not just at states, but at individual cities.
By this measure, San Francisco, Nashville, Miami, Seattle, Orlando Salt Lake City and Washington DC all make it into the top 10 for the number of audio jobs—although at a much smaller scale than New York City or L.A.
We can also look at cities by the concentration of audio jobs, meaning: How many audio engineers are there compared to the general population?
By this measure, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Nashville, New Orleans, Orlando, Springfield MO, Orlando, NYC, Seattle, San Francisco and St. Louis all made the list. Notably absent were Atlanta, Austin Baltimore, Minneapolis and Trenton which had made the top 10 list in prior years.
How much do they pay, by city?
The first time we evaluated these numbers back in 2012, sound engineers in Los Angeles reported the highest average salaries in the nation. But as engineers left NYC for LA, average salaries for L.A. sound engineers actually decreased from $83,000 down to $67,000. Interestingly, New York City audio engineer salaries went up during the same period, from $66,000 to $73,000.
Despite (or because of) its shrinking market share, New York City hit the #1 slot in 2023 after growing to $94,800, with California not far behind at $85,800.
At that time, the the cost of living in California was about 13% lower than New York, offsetting their 10% lower salaries.
Today, New York’s audio salaries are about 3% higher than California’s at $93,760 vs $91,170. But at the same time, the disparity in cost of living has reversed, with the cost of living in California now estimated to be 8% higher than in New York.
If we zero into cities, the cost of living in Brooklyn or Queens vs Los Angeles is now estimated to be closer to L.A., with Brooklyn being about 8% more expensive and Queens being 3% less expensive.
Beating out New York and California this year are Washington state at $115,620, New Jersey at $108,520, and Washington D.C. at $105,500.
Also breaking the $80k barrier were Tennessee, Arizona, Nevada and Maryland.
Although average incomes in smaller markets may be lower, conditions may be comparable to (or even better than) the big cities, from a quality-of-life standpoint. It wouldn’t be surprising if the bottom 50% of earners in Southern markets had far more room to stretch out in their homes than the top 50% of earners in New York, for instance.
Salaries by sector
When we first started crunching these numbers in 2010, the highest salaries went to engineers in the “Motion Picture & Video” sector, and to audio engineers in one of the computing sectors like “Software Publishing” or “Computer Systems Design”.
However, in recent years, audio engineers in Motion Picture & Video have seen their salaries drop out of the top 5 slots, while music and broadcast engineers have been out of the top 10 for some time now.
As of today, the highest incomes go to audio engineers in “Accounting, Tax Preparation, Bookkeeping, and Payroll Services” ($125,200), Software Publishers ($124,750), Publishing Industries ($123,200), Temporary Help Services ($119,030), Emplyment Services ($107,290) Scientific Research and Development Services ($104,620).
What most people tend to ask about though, are audio jobs in music. So let’s get to it! Audio engineers who were identified as working in the “Sound Recording Industries” earned an average of $65,660 up about 7% from $61,500 in 2023.
Although music is one of the lower-paying categories in audio, it is also one of the largest sectors for salaried employment in audio, ranking in the top 5 for total employment, just above the higher-paying Motion Picture and Video field.
As for Motion Picture and Video, it saw a decline both in total amount of employment, and in wages, which at $86,990, were down 9% since 2023.
One can speculate that writers strikes in California, shutdowns of productions due to lockdowns and other factors led to this decrease in jobs and wages for motion picture workers, along with a move toward streaming and social media formats which may show up elsewhere in the data.
Speaking of which, salaries for the category of “Media Streaming Distribution Services, Social Networks, and Other Media Networks & Content Providers” averaged at $81,250, and it is is a category we will keep watching from here on out.
How much training do I need?
Do you need a degree or special training for these jobs? We can get some estimates about the education levels required for audio work from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), a joint project from the US Department of Labor and the Employment & Training Administration (USDOL/ETA).
According to their data, 22% required an associates degree, and 22% required at least a bachelor’s degree. 46% of jobs required no degree, and only 19% of jobs were advertised as requiring less than a high school diploma.
Because I am a nerd, I did my own research when I was the chair of the audio program at the largest audio school in New York City in 2014 and 2015. When I surveyed employers there to slake my own curiosity, I found that 22% of them expressed no minimum education preference at all.
43% of the employers who responded to my surveys preferred at least a post-secondary certificate from a vocational school, while 21% preferred at least an associate’s degree. Just 14% preferred a bachelor’s degree as a minimum credential.
While 64% percent of employers in the field said that an associate’s degree credential offered applicants “an advantage” in hiring, only 14% considered any kind of degree “a necessity”.
None of the employers who responded to my survey expressed any preference or requirement for applicants to have a master’s degree or higher.
In looking at the results from my own school, I found that 50-70% of graduates with vocational certificates were able to find paid employment in the field with in a year, compared to 70%-80% of graduates with associates degrees.
So, on the surface, it appears that obtaining a degree could be helpful in getting a job one year out of the gate. But it could also simply be that the qualities that are necessary for obtaining a degree are the same qualities that tend to make one successful in finding employment. The degree itself may not be the causal factor.
So choose wisely, because a degree is not a guarantee, and the perceived value of a degree seems to be decreasing by the year. As someone who has a done a lot of hiring myself, I can tell you that relevant work experience trumps educational credentials every time, at least from a business perspective.
What’s next?
Trying to predict the future too precisely is a fool’s errand. A trend will often continue unabated, until at some point it can no longer go on. At that point, a long running trend can quickly reverse. Because of this, it’s always wise to approach employment projections with some skepticism and critical reasoning.
I also like to try and remember that many of these numbers come from the US government. Though a well-meaning and well-educated bunch I’m sure, they are also working within the same kind of institutional framework that brings you the Post Office, the DMV, the VA, the FCC and the Federal Reserve— none of which are widely renowned for their foresight or infallibility.
What we can say with some degree of certainty is what has happened recently, and what is happening right now. We can also make some reasonable guesses about what trends are likely to continue for some time (barring any major shocks). Here are a few things that I’m reasonably sure of today:
1. Audio engineers, creative workers—and heck, people in general—are starting to move from the largest and most expensive markets to smaller and more attractive ones. This kind of things seems to happen at least once a generation. I’m living proof of it myself, having recently moved from Brooklyn to a smaller city in New Hampshire for the quality of life and to start a family. The data shows that I’m not alone
2. The world is now full of more video than ever before. That means it’s also full of more audio than ever before. As companies continue to figure out more ways to monetize streaming web video, we can expect more jobs to continue emerge in this field.
3. Recorded music revenues—after taking a decade-long beating—are finally on something of an upward trend again. This is thanks to both the monetization of streaming audio services and crackdowns on unethical pirate websites. As “paying for music” begins to become not only the most ethical, but the most convenient option once again, we should expect income increases in the music sector, and the regaining of some lost ground.
4. Video games continue to bring in more dollars than movies and recorded music combined. The number of audio professionals employed here is small at the moment, but swiftly growing. Of course, more money often attracts more competition. Look for this field, and the number of jobs in it, to continue to grow in the future.
5. Live events—both in music and in the corporate sector—were attracting more revenue than ever before up until the point the whole world locked down in 2020. Although it is still suffering today, it may be poised for a comeback in years to come. In the age of a non-stop stream of digital entertainment and information, people seem to be refreshingly willing to pay more for real-life experiences once again. That’s good, because evidence suggests that experiences make us happier than things.
6. As long as there is audio, there will be jobs in audio. Sometimes more and sometimes less. But this much is certain: Short of the collapse of civilization as we know it, audio isn’t going anywhere.
Justin Colletti is a mastering engineer, educator and writer. He edits SonicScoop.
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