Estimating the number of US IEEE members who are licensed as professional engineers

The number of IEEE Members who are also licensed Professional Engineers is of interest to IEEE and to licensing and policy-making bodies. To determine this number in the United States, we compared the list of IEEE Members in Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Texas to the list of licensed professional engineers in these States. Each individual on the IEEE list was assigned a characteristic string based upon first name, last name, and city where s/he receives IEEE mail. Each individual on the licensee list was assigned a characteristic string based upon first name, last name, and city where s/he receives mail from the licensing authority. These strings were then crosschecked. Since licensees may provide different addresses to the IEEE and the licensing body, we conducted a search for licensees with the same name as an IEEE Member within a radius of 1-hour commute from the city of record of the IEEE Member in the IEEE database. Less than eleven percent of the IEEE members were found to be licensed as Professional Engineers in the States for which we had data. Given that only 75% of IEEE members are believed to eligible for registration, our estimate is that no more than 14% of the eligible IEEE Members in the United States are licensed.