Welders, Cutters, Solderers, and Brazers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Welders, Cutters, Solderers, and Brazers offer sit among all 424,040 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

With 424,040 jobs nationally, Welders, Cutters, Solderers, and Brazers make up 0.28% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 56,650 of those jobs, the top three states hold 24.3%, and the deepest concentration sits in South Dakota (location quotient 2.79, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $75,850, which is 2.0 times the $38,130 at the 10th, a difference of $37,720 annually. Because the mean wage ($55,100) sits above the median ($51,000), 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 Hawaii at $76,970; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Welders, Cutters, Solderers, and Brazers stands number 86 by employment and number 506 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Production Occupations, the group median wage is $46,020 across 105 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 11% more than its group median, and it supplies 4.8% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 28 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $51,000, 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 17,750 jobs, 4.2% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 382 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, $29,490 a year, against $74,750 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $4,250 a month before tax, $1,962 biweekly, $981 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($45,580) to the 75th ($61,610) is worth $16,030 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $56,100 would sit between the median ($51,000) and the 75th percentile ($61,610), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $45,580, is $5,420 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Production Occupations

Sibling occupations in Production Occupations: Coating, Painting, and Spraying Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Molding, Coremaking, and Casting Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic, Printing Press Operators, Meat, Poultry, and Fish Cutters and Trimmers, Butchers and Meat Cutters, Multiple Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.