Insulation Workers, Floor, Ceiling, and Wall 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 Insulation Workers, Floor, Ceiling, and Wall ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $40,270. 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

The occupation employed 38,610 people in May 2024, 0.03% of every job BLS counted. Texas is the largest employer at 5,830 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 25.7% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Montana, whose location quotient of 4.03 says this work is 4.03 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $77,160, which is 2.1 times the $35,950 at the 10th, a difference of $41,210 annually. Because the mean wage ($53,440) sits above the median ($48,680), 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 Texas first at 5,830 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, New York would lead at $63,500. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Insulation Workers, Floor, Ceiling, and Wall stands number 433 by employment and number 553 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 11% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.6% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 22 of the 48 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $48,680, 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

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX is the largest metro employer with 2,130 jobs, 5.5% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 105 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, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $47,220 a year, against $79,080 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-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: $4,057 a month before tax, $1,872 biweekly, $936 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($40,270) to the 75th ($60,420) is worth $20,150 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 $53,548 would sit between the median ($48,680) and the 75th percentile ($60,420), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $40,270, is $8,410 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: Tapers, Derrick Operators, Oil and Gas, Boilermakers, Stonemasons, Helpers--Painters, Paperhangers, Plasterers, and Stucco Masons, Helpers--Extraction Workers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.