Carpet Installers
What the pay figures show
- For once the obvious answer is right. New Jersey pays carpet installers best, at $115,180. It keeps that lead after tax. It keeps it after local prices too — $77,801 in comparable money. Most jobs are not this tidy.
- The nominal leader for carpet installers is also the real leader: New Jersey at $115,180, holding through tax and through price deflation to $77,801. Both adjustments leave the ordering at the top intact, which indicates a wage premium large enough to dominate the state's tax burden and price level rather than merely offset them.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$50,340
People doing it
13,780
Highest paid
$115,180
NJ
Best off, really
$77,801
NJ, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$35,450
Highest tenth
$82,140
Lowest, really
$31,094
SC
States with data
45
National average
$56,990
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
108.88%
NJ, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Where you do this job matters enormously. The best state pays roughly twice what the worst does. Prices alone cannot explain a gap that size. Level everything out and the range still runs $31,094 to $77,801.
- Just 13,780 Americans work in this job. Small fields move around more from year to year.
- This job is not published everywhere — 45 jurisdictions have a figure, with $50,340 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. New Jersey tops the ones that are.
- Geographic dispersion in carpet installers is unusually wide: the top state's median is approximately double the bottom's, a spread that price differentials cannot account for. The real-terms range, after tax and price deflation, still runs $31,094 to $77,801 — so the variation reflects genuine differences in local labor markets rather than a nominal illusion.
- 13,780 are employed nationally in carpet installers — a small occupation, where the state spread above is more sensitive to sample composition than it would be in a large one.
- 45 jurisdictions carry a published median for carpet installers. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Carpet Installers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $35,450 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $50,340 |
| Top tenth earn over | $82,140 |
| This salary | $50,340 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in Carpet Installers
The national median for this job
$50,340around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $35,450 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $50,340 |
| Top tenth | $82,140 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Carpet Installers, state by state
The national median for this job
45states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | South Carolina · $33,810 |
|---|---|
| Highest | New Jersey · $115,180 |
| Spread | $81,370 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $43,610 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $44,878 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| NJ | $115,180 | $84,712 | $77,801 |
| TN | $74,510 | $61,248 | $66,203 |
| MN | $85,910 | $64,949 | $65,994 |
| AK | $76,790 | $62,852 | $61,792 |
| NV | $67,040 | $55,993 | $57,736 |
| MO | $63,960 | $51,503 | $56,127 |
| WI | $60,830 | $48,900 | $52,526 |
| NH | $65,600 | $54,890 | $52,105 |
| IA | $55,920 | $45,599 | $51,369 |
| KS | $57,920 | $45,775 | $50,881 |
| OH | $54,370 | $45,087 | $49,108 |
| NM | $52,700 | $43,213 | $47,810 |
| VT | $54,830 | $44,655 | $46,210 |
| LA | $49,400 | $40,777 | $46,157 |
| ID | $51,550 | $41,722 | $45,635 |
| NE | $50,600 | $41,238 | $45,630 |
| IN | $49,640 | $40,631 | $44,076 |
| MD | $57,030 | $45,658 | $43,917 |
| HI | $58,710 | $46,335 | $42,662 |
| WA | $54,830 | $46,236 | $42,589 |
| OR | $57,800 | $44,115 | $42,126 |
| MI | $48,790 | $39,560 | $42,003 |
| AL | $46,600 | $37,629 | $41,824 |
| CO | $51,280 | $41,836 | $41,265 |
| DE | $50,350 | $40,409 | $40,713 |
| GA | $48,260 | $39,148 | $40,484 |
| IL | $49,480 | $39,633 | $40,092 |
| MT | $43,840 | $36,102 | $40,004 |
| FL | $48,580 | $41,214 | $39,839 |
| OK | $42,490 | $34,909 | $39,541 |
| CA | $54,440 | $44,464 | $39,495 |
| AZ | $47,920 | $39,888 | $39,452 |
| SD | $40,420 | $34,657 | $39,341 |
| VA | $48,920 | $39,435 | $39,142 |
| NY | $52,160 | $41,871 | $38,904 |
| PA | $46,030 | $37,752 | $38,720 |
| CT | $49,230 | $39,771 | $38,356 |
| TX | $43,610 | $37,221 | $38,303 |
| UT | $44,480 | $35,940 | $37,831 |
| AR | $37,390 | $31,298 | $36,179 |
| MA | $47,930 | $38,615 | $35,676 |
| KY | $37,800 | $31,347 | $34,650 |
| MS | $36,590 | $30,208 | $34,606 |
| WV | $36,220 | $30,359 | $33,818 |
| SC | $33,810 | $28,972 | $31,094 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for carpet installers as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $50,340, which means half of everyone doing this work earns less than that. Where you land depends on how long you have done it, who you do it for, and which city you do it in.
- Take-home figures for carpet installers assume one person filing alone, with no dependants and nothing going into a pension before tax. Any of those lowers the tax and raises what you keep, so treat these as the plain case rather than your case. Local city income taxes are not included either, and in a few states those matter. In New Jersey, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $84,712.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for carpet installers. Inside any state, a big city costs far more than a small town, so this is a fair way to compare states with each other and a poor way to price a specific move. The wage figures and the price figures are also from different years. At the bottom of the range sits South Carolina, on $31,094.
- These are distribution medians for carpet installers, with a national value of $50,340. They describe a midpoint rather than an expected offer, and the within-occupation spread — visible in the tenth and ninetieth percentile figures — is wide enough that a state-level median is a weak predictor for any individual worker.
- Take-home calculations for carpet installers assume a single filer with no dependants, the standard deduction, and no pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions. Each omitted item reduces taxable income, so the figures function as a lower bound on retained pay for this household shape; the highest such figure is $84,712, in New Jersey. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- Real-terms results for carpet installers rest on statewide regional price parities, which average over intra-state variation that is itself larger than much of the interstate variation. They support comparison between states and not the pricing of an individual relocation; South Carolina anchors the distribution at $31,094. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.