Insulation Workers, Mechanical 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, Mechanical ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $47,480. 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

May 2024 employment stood at 25,640, or 0.02% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 4,550 jobs; the top three states sum to 27.5% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Wyoming posts a location quotient of 7.19, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $94,110, which is 2.4 times the $39,450 at the 10th, a difference of $54,660 annually. Because the mean wage ($63,540) sits above the median ($57,250), 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 4,550 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Oregon would lead at $123,560. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Insulation Workers, Mechanical stands number 505 by employment and number 451 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 5% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 27 of the 47 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $57,250, 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 1,370 jobs, 5.3% 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, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $52,220 a year, against $82,280 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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, $57,250 a year is $4,771 a month gross, $2,202 every two weeks, $1,101 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($47,480) to the 75th ($75,300) is worth $27,820 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 $4,771 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 $62,975 would sit between the median ($57,250) and the 75th percentile ($75,300), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $47,480, is $9,770 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: Helpers--Extraction Workers, Loading and Moving Machine Operators, Underground Mining, Extraction Workers, All Other, Explosives Workers, Ordnance Handling Experts, and Blasters, Helpers--Roofers, Floor Sanders and Finishers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.