Lighting Technicians 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 Lighting Technicians ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $47,100. 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

BLS counted 10,130 Lighting Technicians jobs in May 2024, which is 0.01% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Nevada, where the location quotient is 3.47, meaning the occupation holds 3.47 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 3,330 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 54.1% of the national total.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $117,690, which is 3.2 times the $36,340 at the 10th, a difference of $81,350 annually. Because the mean wage ($70,000) sits above the median ($60,560), 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 California first at 3,330 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Washington would lead at $109,670. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Lighting Technicians stands number 684 by employment and number 400 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations, the group median wage is $66,220 across 36 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 9% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.5% of the group's 1,989,300 jobs. In 12 of the 30 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $60,560, 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 2,440 jobs, 24.1% 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, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $89,010 a year, against $92,270 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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

The median annual wage of $60,560 works out to $5,047 a month before taxes, $2,329 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,165 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($47,100) to the 75th ($83,340) is worth $36,240 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $66,616 would sit between the median ($60,560) and the 75th percentile ($83,340), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $47,100, is $13,460 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Special Effects Artists and Animators, Broadcast Technicians, Fashion Designers, Umpires, Referees, and Other Sports Officials, Athletes and Sports Competitors, Sound Engineering Technicians. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.