Riggers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Riggers worker at that point in the distribution, so $79,340 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 24,190, or 0.02% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 3,890 jobs; the top three states sum to 39.8% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Louisiana posts a location quotient of 7.56, 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 $100,480, which is 2.6 times the $38,930 at the 10th, a difference of $61,550 annually. Because the mean wage ($66,600) sits above the median ($62,060), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 44 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is New York at $103,230; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Riggers stands number 519 by employment and number 374 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations, the group median wage is $59,300 across 51 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 5% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 6,045,030 jobs. In 22 of the 44 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $62,060, 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 1,800 jobs, 7.4% 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, Houma-Bayou Cane-Thibodaux, LA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $37,600 a year, against $103,070 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

The median Riggers paycheck, gross, is $2,387 every two weeks on an annual $62,060, which is $5,172 a month and $1,193 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($47,940) to the 75th ($79,340) is worth $31,400 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $68,266 would sit between the median ($62,060) and the 75th percentile ($79,340), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $47,940, is $14,120 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations

Sibling occupations in Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations: Telecommunications Line Installers and Repairers, Helpers--Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers, Security and Fire Alarm Systems Installers, Computer, Automated Teller, and Office Machine Repairers, Medical Equipment Repairers, Electrical and Electronics Repairers, Commercial and Industrial Equipment. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.