2020 Salary Survey: Industry Trends & Analysis

The pandemic and social unrest seem to grab all the headlines, but manufacturing is an essential industry that continues to generate wealth for a sizable portion of the population and is worthy of news coverage. However, compared with Cutting Tool Engineering’s biennial Benefits and Salary Survey from 2018, which showed an uptick in pay and benefits for all metalworking professionals on average over the previous two years, 2020’s survey paints a less rosy picture.

Across the board for all positions, salaries are either down a bit or, at least for programmers, about the same as two years earlier based on the national average. Similar to the previous 10 surveys, corporate managers make the most money. Nonetheless, their earnings saw a decline compared with 2018.

Regular CTE readers may notice that the presentation of the national average of salaries by position is different from previous surveys. CTE normally creates a web-based survey instrument using SurveyMonkey and then emails the link to subscribers who have access to companywide salary information. This year, in addition to the usual method, CTE utilized a paid data collection option whereby SurveyMonkey conducted surveys using its own survey panels that targeted the manufacturing industry. To ensure that the difference in respondents by company types did not significantly impact salary results, CTE weighted 2020’s sample to match the company type proportions from 2018’s survey. When comparing average salaries across the unweighted and weighted samples, no meaningful differences were found.

The national average presentation below breaks out companywide results from 103 subscribers, 236 results collected by the survey service and the combined results. However, to provide a more apples-to-apples comparison for salaries by region, company size and company type, as well as benefits provided, the other graphs contain only the results gathered from subscribers.

Chart Key: MM: Manual Machinist; CNC: CNC Machinist; P: Programmer; TD: Tool and Die Maker; TME: Tool/Manufacturing Engineer; DE: Design Engineer; PE: Project Engineer; SS: Shop Supervisor; ES: Engineering Supervisor; PM: Plant Manager; CM: Corporate Manager

For nonweighted results, average salary was calculated according to the arithmetic mean. For instance, if four respondents indicated that their CNC machinists earn average annual salaries of $46,000, $59,000, $53,000 and $51,000, the mean would equal $52,250; (46,000 + 59,000 + 53,000 + 51,000) ÷ 4 = 52,250.