Australia CAD salary in 2025 splits in a way the U.S. drafter tables do not. Jobs and Skills Australia, using the May 2025 Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, reports a full time median of $1,730 a week for civil engineering draftspersons and technicians. The mechanical group, mechanical engineering draftspersons and technicians, had a full time median of $2,589 a week. The all occupation full time median was $1,852 a week. Civil sits below the economy wide middle. Mechanical sits well above it.
Hourly medians tell the same story with a different statistic. Civil was $43 an hour. Mechanical was $65 an hour. All occupations were $47 an hour. These are medians for full time adult employees who are not managers, before tax, and they exclude amounts set aside as salary sacrifice. The weekly median and the hourly median are separate statistics. Multiplying one by a guess at hours will not reproduce the other, so this guide prints both and does not force them to agree.
The occupations are mixed on purpose
Each code contains draftspersons and technicians. A person who only produces CAD drawings and a person whose week includes other technical support share one median. Australia does not publish a pure CAD drafter wage inside these profiles. The United States does, and then refuses to split architectural drafters from civil drafters. Different countries hide different distinctions. Civil drafter salary 2025 and mechanical drafter salary 2025 are the American versions, in U.S. dollars, and they are not conversions of these weekly figures.
| May 2025, full time | Civil engineering draftspersons and technicians | Mechanical engineering draftspersons and technicians | All occupations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median weekly earnings | $1,730 | $2,589 | $1,852 |
| Median hourly earnings | $43 | $65 | $47 |
| Share working full time hours | 92 percent | 94 percent | 69 percent |
| Average full time hours | 42 | 43 | 44 |
Both technical groups are overwhelmingly full time, unlike the economy as a whole. Average full time hours, 42 and 43, come from census based figures in the same profile and are not the hours you should multiply by the hourly median to audit the weekly median. The source says the earnings figures are a guide and should not be used to set a wage rate, because they do not account for experience or the other things that move a person's pay. That warning belongs in the article, not in a footnote nobody reads.
A yearly figure, labeled as multiplication
The survey publishes weekly and hourly medians, not an annual salary. Fifty two weeks at the weekly median is about $90,000 for the civil occupation and about $135,000 for the mechanical occupation. Those are 52 times the published weekly medians, rounded to the nearest thousand. They assume a person receives that weekly median every week of the year. Leave, unpaid time, and overtime mean a real year can differ. If you cite them, cite them as that product.
The gap between the two products is the point of the Australian data. It is much wider than the U.S. gap between architectural and civil drafters at $66,150 a year and mechanical drafters at $71,550. Part of the Australian gap may be the technician mix, the industries attached to each code, or both. The profile does not hand you a clean CAD only explanation. It does make it reckless to talk about an Australian CAD salary without saying civil or mechanical.
What is not in these profiles
There is no Revit premium, no AutoCAD premium, and no BIM manager median on these pages. Building information modeling can be part of the draftsperson's week and still not have a wage line. Electrical drafting is a further occupation this pair does not cover. Quoting the mechanical weekly median for an electrical board designer, or the civil weekly median for a mechanical plant designer, repeats the mistake these numbers exist to prevent.
Canada's comparable figure is hourly and national, $31.79 for drafting technologists and technicians, and it does not split civil from mechanical. Britain's CAD technician median is £35,221 full time and also does not split them. Canada CAD salary 2025 and UK CAD salary 2025 are those surveys. None of the three should be run through an exchange rate and called equivalent.
How to use the Australian medians
If the work is civil drawings and civil technical support, the full time middle in May 2025 was $1,730 a week, below the all occupation weekly median. If the work is mechanical, the full time middle was $2,589 a week, well above it. Say which code you mean. Say the figure mixes draftspersons with technicians. Say it is before tax, for full time adults who are not managers. After that, a local offer can be high or low for reasons the national median will never see, including remote project work and the mining and infrastructure cycles that sit more heavily on some of these jobs than on others. The survey already refused to pretend those cycles are a single CAD wage. The article should refuse too.
Sources
- Jobs and Skills Australia, Civil Engineering Draftspersons and Technicians. Earnings from the ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025.
- Jobs and Skills Australia, Mechanical Engineering Draftspersons and Technicians. Same survey and month.