Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Mechanics and Installers 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 ($39,130) to the 90th ($91,020). 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

BLS counted 396,870 Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Mechanics and Installers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.26% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Idaho, where the location quotient is 1.64, meaning the occupation holds 1.64 times its national share of local jobs. Florida employs the most people outright, 38,290 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 26.3% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $47,850 at the 25th percentile, $59,810 at the middle, $74,820 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $51,890, 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

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Florida first at 38,290 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Alaska would lead at $83,660. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Mechanics and Installers stands number 92 by employment and number 413 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 1% more than its group median, and it supplies 6.6% of the group's 6,045,030 jobs. In 27 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $59,810, 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 21,340 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, $32,610 a year, against $95,570 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. 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

As a household number, $59,810 a year is $4,984 a month gross, $2,300 every two weeks, $1,150 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($47,850) to the 75th ($74,820) is worth $26,970 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 $4,984 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 $65,791 would sit between the median ($59,810) and the 75th percentile ($74,820), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $47,850, is $11,960 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: Wind Turbine Service Technicians, Electronic Equipment Installers and Repairers, Motor Vehicles, Precision Instrument and Equipment Repairers, All Other, Signal and Track Switch Repairers, Electrical and Electronics Installers and Repairers, Transportation Equipment, Musical Instrument Repairers and Tuners. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.