Drywall and Ceiling Tile Installers
What the pay figures show
- Hawaii pays drywall and ceiling tile installers the most, at $104,830. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $70,026 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- Hawaii leads for drywall and ceiling tile installers at $104,830 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $70,026 in price-deflated terms. That robustness is the minority case: across the largest occupations, state income tax reorders the leader roughly a third of the time and price level does so more often still. Where the nominal leader survives both, the wage premium is large enough to absorb the state's own tax and price levels.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$58,930
People doing it
83,080
Highest paid
$104,830
HI
Best off, really
$70,026
HI, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$38,460
Highest tenth
$102,010
Lowest, really
$35,236
MS
States with data
49
National average
$63,600
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
108.61%
HI, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Geography does a lot of the work in this job. Pay roughly doubles between the lowest state and the highest. Tax and prices narrow that gap. They come nowhere near closing it — the real range is still $35,236 up to $70,026.
- Only 83,080 people do this job in the whole country. It is a small field, so the pay figures rest on fewer reports.
- Some states are missing here. There are figures for 49 jurisdictions, averaging $58,930 in the middle. A blank means nobody published a number, not that the job pays nothing there. Hawaii leads the published set.
- The nominal spread for drywall and ceiling tile installers approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $35,236 to $70,026, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- National employment in drywall and ceiling tile installers is 83,080. ⚠️ At this headcount the state-level medians rest on comparatively thin samples, and year-to-year movement in any one state reflects sampling as much as wages.
- Coverage for drywall and ceiling tile installers runs to 49 jurisdictions, short of the full set. The omitted states are suppressed at source; treat the spread above as the range across reported states rather than across the country.
Pay band: Drywall and Ceiling Tile Installers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $38,460 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $58,930 |
| Top tenth earn over | $102,010 |
| This salary | $58,930 |
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 Drywall and Ceiling Tile Installers
The national median for this job
$58,930around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $38,460 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $58,930 |
| Top tenth | $102,010 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Drywall and Ceiling Tile Installers, state by state
The national median for this job
49states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Mississippi · $37,310 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Hawaii · $104,830 |
| Spread | $67,520 |
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 | $47,590 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $48,974 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| HI | $104,830 | $76,054 | $70,026 |
| AK | $73,690 | $60,671 | $59,648 |
| WA | $73,130 | $60,277 | $55,523 |
| OH | $61,420 | $50,558 | $55,067 |
| MO | $62,580 | $50,459 | $54,989 |
| NJ | $75,080 | $59,048 | $54,231 |
| MT | $60,140 | $48,433 | $53,669 |
| OR | $73,530 | $54,675 | $52,210 |
| WI | $59,970 | $48,260 | $51,839 |
| PA | $61,160 | $49,444 | $50,712 |
| IL | $63,180 | $49,963 | $50,541 |
| MA | $69,500 | $54,568 | $50,415 |
| VT | $59,820 | $48,408 | $50,093 |
| MI | $58,440 | $46,904 | $49,800 |
| MN | $61,290 | $48,782 | $49,567 |
| NH | $61,960 | $51,965 | $49,328 |
| ME | $60,080 | $47,719 | $49,146 |
| CO | $61,780 | $49,810 | $49,131 |
| NM | $53,900 | $44,121 | $48,814 |
| GA | $58,260 | $46,684 | $48,277 |
| IA | $51,030 | $41,855 | $47,152 |
| SD | $48,850 | $41,431 | $47,030 |
| CA | $65,880 | $52,917 | $47,003 |
| CT | $60,480 | $48,199 | $46,484 |
| NV | $52,280 | $44,187 | $45,563 |
| NY | $61,280 | $48,706 | $45,255 |
| LA | $47,420 | $39,246 | $44,423 |
| VA | $55,840 | $44,597 | $44,266 |
| IN | $49,810 | $40,762 | $44,219 |
| NE | $48,620 | $39,738 | $43,969 |
| TN | $47,510 | $40,354 | $43,619 |
| KY | $48,340 | $39,447 | $43,603 |
| ND | $45,110 | $38,426 | $43,384 |
| UT | $51,020 | $40,904 | $43,056 |
| AL | $48,000 | $38,692 | $43,005 |
| OK | $46,080 | $37,632 | $42,625 |
| AR | $44,550 | $36,786 | $42,523 |
| MD | $54,680 | $43,882 | $42,208 |
| TX | $47,590 | $40,419 | $41,594 |
| WY | $43,990 | $37,526 | $41,306 |
| AZ | $50,290 | $41,733 | $41,277 |
| SC | $45,340 | $37,920 | $40,697 |
| DE | $50,170 | $40,274 | $40,577 |
| FL | $48,970 | $41,527 | $40,142 |
| NC | $45,080 | $37,112 | $39,422 |
| ID | $43,790 | $35,898 | $39,265 |
| RI | $47,110 | $38,686 | $38,148 |
| KS | $39,890 | $32,294 | $35,897 |
| MS | $37,310 | $30,758 | $35,236 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of drywall and ceiling tile installers earn less than the figures here and half earn more, and experience, employer and city move an individual a long way from the middle. Nationally the middle earns $58,930.
- Take-home figures for drywall and ceiling tile 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 Hawaii, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $76,054.
- Levelling out prices for drywall and ceiling tile installers is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — Mississippi sits at the bottom on $35,236.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for drywall and ceiling tile installers, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $58,930, with half of workers below it; dispersion within a state routinely exceeds the dispersion between states, driven by tenure, employer size, sector and metropolitan area. An individual's position in the distribution is not predictable from geography alone.
- Take-home calculations for drywall and ceiling tile 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 $76,054, in Hawaii. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- The price deflation applied to drywall and ceiling tile installers uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is Mississippi at $35,236. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Mississippi anchors the bottom at $35,236 — and the two source series are dated independently.