---
title: "What can you do with a civil engineering degree?"
description: "14 careers civil engineering graduates commonly move into, with BLS median pay, projected growth and entry requirements for each."
canonical: "https://nuecareer.com/careers/majors/civil-engineering"
last-updated: "2026-08-23T07:20:09.337Z"
---

# What can you do with a civil engineering degree?

**What the degree involves:** Structures, soils, hydraulics, and surveying, plus site visits and a lot of standards.

Civil engineering feeds the built environment, so the destinations split between design work at a consultancy, delivery work on site, and the public-sector roles that permit, inspect and plan what gets built. Professional licensure matters more here than in most engineering fields and shapes how far the design route goes.

14 common destinations, ordered most common first rather than highest paid first. 1 of 14 have a master's or a doctoral or professional degree as their BLS typical entry education, and 11 of 14 are projected to grow. A major is a body of study, not a job assignment: these are destinations of people who took the degree, not what the degree entitles anyone to.

| # | Occupation | Median annual wage | Projected change | Openings a year | Typical entry education |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | [Civil Engineer](https://nuecareer.com/careers/civil-engineer) | $100,840 | +5.0% | 23,600 | Bachelor's |
| 2 | [Construction Manager](https://nuecareer.com/careers/construction-manager) | $114,990 | +8.7% | 46,800 | Bachelor's |
| 3 | Civil Engineering Technologist and Technician | $64,950 | +2.1% | 5,500 | Associate's |
| 4 | [Transportation Engineer](https://nuecareer.com/careers/transportation-engineer) | $100,840 | +5.0% | 23,600 | Bachelor's |
| 5 | [Water/Wastewater Engineer](https://nuecareer.com/careers/water-wastewater-engineer) | $100,840 | +5.0% | 23,600 | Bachelor's |
| 6 | Environmental Engineer | $107,110 | +3.9% | 3,000 | Bachelor's |
| 7 | [Construction and Building Inspector](https://nuecareer.com/careers/construction-and-building-inspector) | $74,690 | -0.8% | 14,800 | High school |
| 8 | Surveyor | $75,440 | +4.4% | 3,900 | Bachelor's |
| 9 | [Cost Estimator](https://nuecareer.com/careers/cost-estimator) | $78,740 | -4.2% | 16,900 | Bachelor's |
| 10 | Urban and Regional Planner | $89,320 | +3.4% | 3,400 | Master's (graduate study) |
| 11 | Transportation Planner | $101,110 | -1.7% | 3,200 | Bachelor's |
| 12 | Mining and Geological Engineer, Including Mining Safety Engineers | $106,220 | +0.7% | 400 | Bachelor's |
| 13 | [Project Management Specialist](https://nuecareer.com/careers/project-management-specialist) | $102,320 | +5.6% | 78,200 | Bachelor's |
| 14 | [Architectural and Engineering Manager](https://nuecareer.com/careers/architectural-and-engineering-manager) | $171,270 | +3.8% | 14,500 | Bachelor's |

Wages are BLS OEWS, May 2025. Projected change, annual openings and typical entry education are BLS Employment Projections. Occupation descriptions are O\*NET. Nothing on this page is estimated and no figure is generated by an AI model.

Full record for any row, including wage percentiles and state-level pay: https://nuecareer.com/careers/{slug} or https://nuecareer.com/api/v1/careers/{slug}. Other majors: https://nuecareer.com/careers/majors

---

This bank includes information from the O\*NET 30.3 Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). Used under the CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). O\*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. NueCareer has transformed the data by joining it to BLS wage and projection data and deriving facet, personality-fit and AI-resilience scores. BLS and BEA data are public domain (17 U.S.C. §105).

O\*NET content is used under [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). How these figures are sourced and derived: https://nuecareer.com/careers/methodology