Construction Laborers 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 Construction Laborers ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $38,100. 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 1,057,660 Construction Laborers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.69% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Idaho, where the location quotient is 2.12, meaning the occupation holds 2.12 times its national share of local jobs. Texas employs the most people outright, 117,580 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 26.4% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $38,100 at the 25th percentile, $46,730 at the middle, $58,910 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $43,330, a ratio of 2.3 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

The state spread for Construction Laborers runs from the $66,100 median in Hawaii down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in Texas (117,580 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Construction Laborers stands number 32 by employment and number 605 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 15% less than its group median, and it supplies 16.6% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 25 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $46,730, 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 44,830 jobs, 4.2% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 393 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Aguadilla, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $23,750 a year, against $76,460 in Trenton-Princeton, NJ. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $3,894 a month before tax, $1,797 biweekly, $899 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($38,100) to the 75th ($58,910) is worth $20,810 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 $51,403 would sit between the median ($46,730) and the 75th percentile ($58,910), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $38,100, is $8,630 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

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Floor Layers, Except Carpet, Wood, and Hard Tiles, Helpers--Carpenters, Elevator and Escalator Installers and Repairers, Fence Erectors, Plasterers and Stucco Masons, Earth Drillers, Except Oil and Gas. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.