Boilermakers 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 ($48,390) to the 90th ($107,600). 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

May 2024 employment stood at 10,170, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 2,440 jobs; the top three states sum to 46.7% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Louisiana posts a location quotient of 12.89, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $59,210 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($107,600) is 2.2 times the 10th percentile ($48,390), a gap of $59,210 a year. The mean of $76,900 sitting above the median of $73,340 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

South Carolina posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $124,400, and Texas the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Boilermakers stands number 681 by employment and number 265 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Construction and Extraction Occupations, the group median wage is $54,660 across 60 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 34% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.2% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 17 of the 36 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $73,340, 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

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX is the largest metro employer with 1,120 jobs, 11.0% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $69,180 a year, against $82,270 in Baton Rouge, LA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Boilermakers paycheck, gross, is $2,821 every two weeks on an annual $73,340, which is $6,112 a month and $1,410 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($62,230) to the 75th ($93,520) is worth $31,290 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 $80,674 would sit between the median ($73,340) and the 75th percentile ($93,520), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $62,230, is $11,110 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Construction and Extraction Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Extraction Workers, All Other, Explosives Workers, Ordnance Handling Experts, and Blasters, Helpers--Roofers, Floor Sanders and Finishers, Underground Mining Machine Operators, All Other, Rock Splitters, Quarry. The full directory is on the Careers hub.