Explosives Workers, Ordnance Handling Experts, and Blasters 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 ($45,160) to the 90th ($104,210). 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

The occupation employed 5,680 people in May 2024, 0.00% of every job BLS counted. Maryland is the largest employer at 770 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 26.9% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Maryland, whose location quotient of 7.60 says this work is 7.60 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $104,210, which is 2.3 times the $45,160 at the 10th, a difference of $59,050 annually. Because the mean wage ($66,840) sits above the median ($59,110), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Maryland first at 770 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, New York would lead at $104,320. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Explosives Workers, Ordnance Handling Experts, and Blasters stands number 750 by employment and number 424 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 8% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.1% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 21 of the 34 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $59,110, 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

Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV is the largest metro employer with 600 jobs, 10.6% 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, Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $82,790 a year, against $82,790 in Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV. 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

As a household number, $59,110 a year is $4,926 a month gross, $2,273 every two weeks, $1,137 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($49,860) to the 75th ($80,050) is worth $30,190 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $4,926 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $65,021 would sit between the median ($59,110) and the 75th percentile ($80,050), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $49,860, is $9,250 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: Construction Laborers, First-Line Supervisors of Construction Trades and Extraction Workers, Electricians, Carpenters, Operating Engineers and Other Construction Equipment Operators, Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.