Automotive Service Technicians and Mechanics Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($33,660) to the 90th ($80,850). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

With 688,840 jobs nationally, Automotive Service Technicians and Mechanics make up 0.45% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 67,060 of those jobs, the top three states hold 25.4%, and the deepest concentration sits in New Hampshire (location quotient 1.48, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $38,140 at the 25th percentile, $49,670 at the middle, $65,660 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $47,190, a ratio of 2.4 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Texas first at 67,060 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, District of Columbia would lead at $71,030. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Automotive Service Technicians and Mechanics stands number 53 by employment and number 526 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations, the group median wage is $59,300 across 51 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 16% less than its group median, and it supplies 11.4% of the group's 6,045,030 jobs. In 23 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $49,670, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 27,540 jobs, 4.0% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $26,640 a year, against $81,620 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Automotive Service Technicians and Mechanics paycheck, gross, is $1,910 every two weeks on an annual $49,670, which is $4,139 a month and $955 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($38,140) to the 75th ($65,660) is worth $27,520 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $54,637 would sit between the median ($49,670) and the 75th percentile ($65,660), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $38,140, is $11,530 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Electric Motor, Power Tool, and Related Repairers, Locksmiths and Safe Repairers, Motorcycle Mechanics, Bicycle Repairers, Radio, Cellular, and Tower Equipment Installers and Repairers, Wind Turbine Service Technicians. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.