Structural Iron and Steel Workers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Structural Iron and Steel Workers ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $49,090. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 64,720 people in May 2024, 0.04% of every job BLS counted. Texas is the largest employer at 10,090 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 31.4% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Maine, whose location quotient of 2.93 says this work is 2.93 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $107,520, which is 2.6 times the $42,000 at the 10th, a difference of $65,520 annually. Because the mean wage ($69,270) sits above the median ($62,700), 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, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Massachusetts at $116,630; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Structural Iron and Steel Workers stands number 343 by employment and number 364 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 1.0% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 26 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $62,700, 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

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX is the largest metro employer with 3,230 jobs, 5.0% 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, San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $51,460 a year, against $105,140 in Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH. 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, $62,700 a year is $5,225 a month gross, $2,412 every two weeks, $1,206 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($49,090) to the 75th ($82,780) is worth $33,690 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 $5,225 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 $68,970 would sit between the median ($62,700) and the 75th percentile ($82,780), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $49,090, is $13,610 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: Hazardous Materials Removal Workers, Paving, Surfacing, and Tamping Equipment Operators, Roustabouts, Oil and Gas, Service Unit Operators, Oil and Gas, Helpers--Pipelayers, Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters, Tile and Stone Setters. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.