Tile and Stone Setters 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 Tile and Stone Setters ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $44,540. 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

BLS counted 38,740 Tile and Stone Setters jobs in May 2024, which is 0.03% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Utah, where the location quotient is 4.53, meaning the occupation holds 4.53 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 7,250 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 39.8% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $44,540 at the 25th percentile, $52,240 at the middle, $64,980 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $46,820, a ratio of 2.3 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

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 7,250 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Hawaii would lead at $96,080. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Tile and Stone Setters stands number 431 by employment and number 488 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 4% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.6% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 19 of the 47 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $52,240, 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 2,630 jobs, 6.8% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 138 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, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $42,850 a year, against $76,390 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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, $52,240 a year is $4,353 a month gross, $2,009 every two weeks, $1,005 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($44,540) to the 75th ($64,980) is worth $20,440 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 $4,353 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 $57,464 would sit between the median ($52,240) and the 75th percentile ($64,980), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $44,540, is $7,700 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters, Painters, Construction and Maintenance, Cement Masons and Concrete Finishers, Highway Maintenance Workers, Construction and Building Inspectors, Roofers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.