Security and Fire Alarm Systems Installers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Security and Fire Alarm Systems Installers offer sit among all 81,510 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 81,510 people in May 2024, 0.05% of every job BLS counted. Texas is the largest employer at 10,020 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 31.2% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Missouri, whose location quotient of 1.75 says this work is 1.75 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $81,980, which is 2.1 times the $38,410 at the 10th, a difference of $43,570 annually. Because the mean wage ($60,040) sits above the median ($59,300), 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 10,020 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Oregon would lead at $78,080. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Security and Fire Alarm Systems Installers stands number 301 by employment and number 421 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 0% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.3% of the group's 6,045,030 jobs. In 24 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $59,300, 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 4,310 jobs, 5.3% 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, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $51,010 a year, against $80,830 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. 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 Security and Fire Alarm Systems Installers paycheck, gross, is $2,281 every two weeks on an annual $59,300, which is $4,942 a month and $1,140 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($47,330) to the 75th ($71,340) is worth $24,010 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 $65,230 would sit between the median ($59,300) and the 75th percentile ($71,340), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $47,330, is $11,970 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Electrical Power-Line Installers and Repairers, Tire Repairers and Changers, Telecommunications Line Installers and Repairers, Helpers--Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers, Computer, Automated Teller, and Office Machine Repairers, Medical Equipment Repairers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.