Open survey
Commissioning pay survey
Thirteen fields, no name, about two minutes. Base pay, per diem, overtime, W-2 or 1099, travel and the highest level you have led. Results publish here once 50 people have answered.
By Czarina Tabayoyong, Founder, Critical Path Hiring. Former Amazon, AWS and Google recruiter.
Last reviewed · First published
Opened 2026-11-04. Results publish at 50 responses and refresh each quarter after that.
Refresh alerts
One email each time this page is refreshed, with what changed.
Why
Every commissioning pay number online comes from job postings, ours included. Postings run $38 to $60 an hour for technicians and $101k to $159k for engineers in our October 2026 reading, and people who do the work say the base rate misses most of what they take home. Per diem is the usual reason: a $38 base with, say, $150 a day per diem on a 50-hour week is a different job from a $38 base with none, and no posting states that arithmetic. This survey asks for the pieces separately.
Answers are counted, not read one by one. Once 50 are in, the medians by role, level led, employment type and travel share go on this page with the count behind each figure, and the posting-based ranges get a column next to them.
Survey
Results publish at 50 responses.
Rules
- No personal data is asked for or stored. The form has no name, email or company field.
- Results publish at 50 responses. No figure is shown for a group with fewer than 5 answers.
- Every published figure carries its count and the date range of the answers behind it.
- Obvious junk (a $2 hourly rate, a $9 million salary) is dropped and the number dropped is stated.
- Responses are never sold, shared or used to contact anyone. Nobody can be contacted from them.
Questions
Why run a pay survey when postings already state pay?
Postings state what an employer is willing to put in an ad. They leave out per diem, overtime, bonus and whether the role is W-2 or 1099, and they say nothing about what the person who took the job accepted. Our October 2026 reading of 48 postings is on the pay ranges page; this survey asks the people doing the work.
Is the survey anonymous?
Yes. The form has no name, email or company field, and nothing you enter is stored beyond the answers themselves. The free-text box is the only place you could identify yourself, so leave names out of it.
When do results publish?
When 50 responses are in. Results are shown as counts and medians by role, level, employment type and travel share, and no cut with fewer than 5 answers is shown. The page says how many answers each figure rests on.
Related
Commissioning pay ranges
Posted pay for commissioning engineers, managers and agents from public job postings, updated monthly.
Commissioning job levels
How six employers level commissioning jobs in their postings, and the five levels we screen to.
Pay premium
Posted commissioning pay against local electrician and engineer pay in nine metros.
Czarina Tabayoyong
Founder and principal recruiter, Critical Path Hiring. Czarina recruits commissioning, MEP, power and critical facilities people for data center builds. She previously recruited cloud and data center architecture talent at AWS Professional Services, and PMO and project delivery talent for hyperscale data center campuses in Texas and Virginia.