Solar Photovoltaic Installers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($39,070) to the 90th ($80,150). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 28,280 people in May 2024, 0.02% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 8,970 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 57.6% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Hawaii, whose location quotient of 3.21 says this work is 3.21 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $46,040 at the 25th percentile, $51,860 at the middle, $63,020 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $41,080, a ratio of 2.1 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

Rhode Island posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $103,880, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Solar Photovoltaic Installers stands number 491 by employment and number 497 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 5% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 13 of the 27 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $51,860, 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 1,870 jobs, 6.6% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 53 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, $24,440 a year, against $74,250 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, 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

As a household number, $51,860 a year is $4,322 a month gross, $1,995 every two weeks, $997 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($46,040) to the 75th ($63,020) is worth $16,980 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 $4,322 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 $57,046 would sit between the median ($51,860) and the 75th percentile ($63,020), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $46,040, is $5,820 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Helpers--Pipelayers, Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters, Tile and Stone Setters, Insulation Workers, Floor, Ceiling, and Wall, Excavating and Loading Machine and Dragline Operators, Surface Mining, Pipelayers, Miscellaneous Construction and Related Workers. The full directory is on the Careers hub.