Carpenters Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Carpenters ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $47,550. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 697,740 Carpenters jobs in May 2024, which is 0.45% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Vermont, where the location quotient is 2.19, meaning the occupation holds 2.19 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 106,500 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 28.0% of the national total.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $59,610 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($98,370) is 2.5 times the 10th percentile ($38,760), a gap of $59,610 a year. The mean of $64,040 sitting above the median of $59,310 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 106,500 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Hawaii would lead at $85,970. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Carpenters stands number 51 by employment and number 420 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 9% more than its group median, and it supplies 11.0% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 23 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $59,310, 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 37,690 jobs, 5.4% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

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, $29,170 a year, against $88,760 in Urban Honolulu, HI. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $4,942 a month before tax, $2,281 biweekly, $1,141 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($47,550) to the 75th ($75,620) is worth $28,070 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $65,241 would sit between the median ($59,310) and the 75th percentile ($75,620), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $47,550, is $11,760 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters, Painters, Construction and Maintenance, Cement Masons and Concrete Finishers, Highway Maintenance Workers, Construction and Building Inspectors, Roofers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.