Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters offer sit among all 455,940 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

The occupation employed 455,940 people in May 2024, 0.30% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 45,460 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 25.1% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Louisiana, whose location quotient of 1.60 says this work is 1.60 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $48,860 at the 25th percentile, $62,970 at the middle, $81,900 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $64,480, a ratio of 2.6 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

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Illinois at $96,200; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters stands number 78 by employment and number 360 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 15% more than its group median, and it supplies 7.2% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 22 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $62,970, 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

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 21,500 jobs, 4.7% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 384 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $29,330 a year, against $102,780 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. 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: $5,248 a month before tax, $2,422 biweekly, $1,211 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($48,860) to the 75th ($81,900) is worth $33,040 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 $69,267 would sit between the median ($62,970) and the 75th percentile ($81,900), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $48,860, is $14,110 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

Sibling occupations in Construction and Extraction Occupations: Sheet Metal Workers, Drywall and Ceiling Tile Installers, Structural Iron and Steel Workers, Helpers--Electricians, Glaziers, Brickmasons and Blockmasons. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.