Highway Engineer

Highway engineers design, assess and oversee the building and maintenance of roads and the things that go with them - junctions, roundabouts, footways, cycle lanes, drainage, signs and road markings. They work for local councils, Government agencies responsible for major roads, and the consultancies and contractors those bodies hire. Day to day it is a mix of technical design work on a computer, checking standards and safety rules, and visits to sites where work is being built.

Starting salary: £25k–£32k
Live graduate jobs: 3 open now
Main way in: Civil engineering graduate scheme at a multidisciplinary…
They usually ask for: A degree in civil engineering is the standard expectation

Approximate graduate salary

Typically around £25,000–£32,000 to start, though this varies widely. Large consultancies in London and the South East tend to sit at the upper end, local authorities and smaller regional firms lower. Pay usually rises noticeably on achieving professional registration, and contractors sometimes add site or travel allowances.

What you'd actually do

Producing and amending road layouts in CAD and civil design software - setting out the horizontal line of a road, its vertical levels and gradients, junction geometry, kerb lines and visibility splays (the clear sight lines a driver needs at a junction)
Checking designs against national design standards for roads, which set out rules on things as specific as lane widths, sign sizes and crossing layouts, and writing down a justification where a design cannot meet them
Doing drainage and earthworks calculations - working out where surface water goes, sizing gullies and pipes, and estimating how much soil has to be cut away or imported
Going out to site to survey an existing road, take levels and photographs, check that what was built matches the drawings, or attend a progress meeting with the contractor

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Writing or reviewing technical reports - road safety audits, feasibility studies, traffic impact assessments for new housing or retail developments, and responses to planning applications
Pricing work up: preparing bills of quantities and cost estimates so a client knows roughly what a scheme will cost before committing to it
Answering queries from the site team during construction, and from members of the public, councillors or developers about what a scheme will do to their street

How graduates get in

Civil engineering graduate scheme at a multidisciplinary engineering consultancy - the most common route, and usually structured around working towards chartered status with a professional institution
Direct entry as a graduate or assistant engineer at a local authority highways department or a highways maintenance contractor - often advertised individually rather than as a scheme, and frequently open year-round rather than on a September intake cycle
Degree apprenticeship or school-leaver route into a consultancy or contractor, with the employer funding a part-time civil engineering degree - increasingly common, and worth knowing about if you are reading this before starting a degree
Converting from a related degree (geography, geology, environmental science, maths, physics) via an accredited MSc in civil or transport engineering - realistic but you will usually need the conversion qualification to progress to chartership

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Moving across from a technician or site role, often after an HNC/HND and part-time study - slower, but common in local government and among contractors
Summer placements and industrial placement years with consultancies and contractors are the single strongest route into a graduate offer; many graduate hires come from people the firm has already had on placement

What employers ask for

A degree in civil engineering is the standard expectation. Accreditation matters more than it does in most graduate jobs: an accredited BEng or MEng is what feeds cleanly into chartered engineer status later, and an MEng (or BEng plus an accredited MSc) is the usual route to Chartered Engineer rather than Incorporated Engineer
Related degrees - transport planning, geography, construction engineering, geology, maths, physics - are accepted by some employers, especially for transport planning-flavoured highway roles, but you will usually be expected to top up with an accredited MSc
A 2:1 is the common ask at larger consultancies; plenty of local authorities and contractors will take a 2:2 with relevant placement or site experience, so do not rule yourself out on grades alone
A full UK driving licence is genuinely useful and sometimes required, because site visits are often to places with no practical public transport

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Expect to work towards professional registration - Incorporated or Chartered Engineer with the Institution of Civil Engineers or the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation. This takes several years of recorded experience plus a professional review, and timescales vary a lot by person and employer
Site-based work needs a construction skills card and basic health and safety training; employers normally arrange and pay for these

Skills that matter

CAD and civil design software (AutoCAD plus a package such as Civil 3D or an alignment design tool)

Almost every design you produce exists first as a drawing or a 3D model, and fluency here is what makes you useful in your first year.

Reading and applying written technical standards

Highway design is heavily governed by published standards and you spend a lot of time looking up the applicable clause and working out whether your design complies or needs a formal departure.

Spatial and geometric reasoning

You need to picture how a road curve, a change in level and a visibility line interact in three dimensions before you can tell whether a junction will actually work.

Clear technical writing

Reports go to planning officers, councillors and sometimes public inquiries, so you must explain a technical judgement to people who are not engineers and who may object to the scheme.

Commercial awareness about cost and buildability

A design that is elegant but expensive, or that cannot be built while keeping the road open to traffic, gets rejected - you learn to design for how work will actually be sequenced on site.

Comfort dealing with disagreement

Highway schemes affect parking, bus routes, cycle provision and people's front doors, so your work is routinely challenged by residents, developers and other departments.

Putting these on a CV? We counted which skills 12,914 live graduate adverts ask for, and what to do with the answer — part of our application advice.

Where it leads

Graduate or assistant engineer: supervised design work, drawing production, site visits, and recording your experience against the competences needed for professional registration
Engineer: owning discrete parts of a scheme, checking junior colleagues' drawings, and dealing directly with clients on smaller jobs. This is usually where professional review for Incorporated or Chartered status happens, though the timing varies widely - a few years for some, considerably longer for others
Senior engineer or principal engineer: leading the design of whole schemes, managing fee budgets and programmes, and supervising a small team
From there the paths fork: technical specialism (drainage, pavement design, road safety auditing, traffic signals), project or programme management, or client-side work for a council or Government highways body
Longer term, associate or technical director in consultancy, or head of highways/transport in a local authority. Some move sideways into transport planning, rail, water or general infrastructure design, since the core civil engineering skills transfer

What people get wrong

“You will spend most of your time in a hard hat on site.”

Most highway engineering roles are desk-based design and report work, with site visits as a regular but secondary part of the job. If you want to be on site daily, site engineer or site management roles with a contractor are the better fit.

“It is all about building new roads.”

A large share of UK highways work is maintaining, resurfacing and retrofitting what already exists, plus designing cycle lanes, bus priority measures, crossings and junction improvements. Many highway engineers now spend more time taking space away from cars than adding it.

“It is purely a technical job where you just follow the standards.”

Schemes are political. Councillors, residents' groups, bus operators and cycling campaigners all have a view, and a big part of the job is explaining and defending design decisions in public consultation, planning committees and occasionally public inquiries.

“Any engineering or science graduate can walk into it.”

You can get in from a related degree, but if you want chartered status - which is what unlocks senior pay and responsibility - you generally need an accredited civil engineering qualification, which may mean an MSc. It is worth checking accreditation before you commit to a course.

Where this varies

The job differs a lot depending on who employs you. In a consultancy you are typically billing time to several clients at once, working on design from feasibility through to detailed drawings, with pressure on fee budgets and timesheets. In a local authority you are the client: more time on managing programmes of maintenance, assessing developers' proposals, responding to residents and councillors, and less hands-on CAD - the pace is generally steadier and the pay often lower, but conditions and pensions can be better. With a contractor the emphasis shifts to buildability, temporary traffic management and solving problems that appear once the road is dug up. Geographically, major scheme work clusters around large consultancy offices and the strategic road network, while almost every council in the country has some highways function, so this is one of the more geographically spread engineering careers in the UK. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own roads authorities and some differences in standards and procurement.

See all 3 live Highway Engineer jobsFrom employers' own careers sites, updated daily Tailor your CV for this roleFree with an account, 3 a month

General guidance about the role across the UK market, not about any specific employer. Entry routes and requirements vary — always check the individual job advert.