Helpers, Construction Trades, All Other 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 ($31,200) to the 90th ($59,280). 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 25,510, or 0.02% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 4,050 jobs; the top three states sum to 40.2% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Louisiana posts a location quotient of 6.47, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $36,400 at the 25th percentile, $40,760 at the middle, $48,500 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $28,080, a ratio of 1.9 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 Helpers, Construction Trades, All Other runs from the $66,510 median in New York down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in California (4,050 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Helpers, Construction Trades, All Other stands number 509 by employment and number 694 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 25% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 21 of the 42 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $40,760, 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

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 1,280 jobs, 5.0% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

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, $21,860 a year, against $71,920 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $3,397 a month before tax, $1,568 biweekly, $784 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($36,400) to the 75th ($48,500) is worth $12,100 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 $44,836 would sit between the median ($40,760) and the 75th percentile ($48,500), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $36,400, is $4,360 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: Elevator and Escalator Installers and Repairers, Fence Erectors, Plasterers and Stucco Masons, Earth Drillers, Except Oil and Gas, Rail-Track Laying and Maintenance Equipment Operators, Helpers--Brickmasons, Blockmasons, Stonemasons, and Tile and Marble Setters. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.