Pipelayers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Pipelayers offer sit among all 33,580 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

With 33,580 jobs nationally, Pipelayers make up 0.02% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 6,200 of those jobs, the top three states hold 40.4%, and the deepest concentration sits in North Carolina (location quotient 2.92, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $80,710, which is 2.2 times the $36,840 at the 10th, a difference of $43,870 annually. Because the mean wage ($54,270) sits above the median ($48,710), 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 6,200 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Alaska would lead at $93,500. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Pipelayers stands number 463 by employment and number 551 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 0.5% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 30 of the 46 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $48,710, 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

Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX is the largest metro employer with 1,730 jobs, 5.2% 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, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $45,140 a year, against $84,010 in Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA. 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

As a household number, $48,710 a year is $4,059 a month gross, $1,873 every two weeks, $937 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($42,320) to the 75th ($60,980) is worth $18,660 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 $4,059 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 $53,581 would sit between the median ($48,710) and the 75th percentile ($60,980), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $42,320, is $6,390 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: Tile and Stone Setters, Insulation Workers, Floor, Ceiling, and Wall, Excavating and Loading Machine and Dragline Operators, Surface Mining, Miscellaneous Construction and Related Workers, Septic Tank Servicers and Sewer Pipe Cleaners, Solar Photovoltaic Installers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.