Fence Erectors
What the pay figures show
- Alaska comes first for fence erectors on every measure. $64,600 on paper. Still first after tax. Still first at $53,174 once you adjust for what things cost. When the headline and the reality agree, say so plainly.
- For fence erectors, Alaska's $64,600 median is the highest nominally, after tax, and after regional price adjustment, at $53,174. Concordance across all three measures is uncommon and worth stating explicitly, because the absence of a reordering is itself the finding for this occupation.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$47,980
People doing it
24,480
Highest paid
$64,600
AK
Best off, really
$53,174
AK, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$35,810
Highest tenth
$70,010
Lowest, really
$31,701
GA
States with data
45
National average
$50,530
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
101.72%
AK, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- The state you work in changes what this job pays, but less than you would expect. Level out tax and prices and the whole country sits between $31,701 and $53,174. That is a real difference. It is not usually a moving-house difference.
- This is a small job: about 24,480 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 45 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $47,980. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, Alaska pays most.
- Interstate variation for fence erectors is contained relative to other occupations, and narrows further under adjustment: the real range is $31,701 to $53,174. A differential of this magnitude is real but rarely decisive on its own, which is worth stating plainly against wage tables that present nominal gaps without either adjustment.
- With 24,480 workers, fence erectors is among the smaller occupations BLS publishes. Treat single-state figures as indicative rather than precise; suppression and sampling error both bite harder at this scale.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for fence erectors in 45 jurisdictions, short of the full set. ⚠️ Absence reflects estimate suppression — small samples or disclosure rules — rather than absence of employment, so the state comparison above is over the published subset.
Pay band: Fence Erectors
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $35,810 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $47,980 |
| Top tenth earn over | $70,010 |
| This salary | $47,980 |
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 Fence Erectors
The national median for this job
$47,980around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $35,810 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $47,980 |
| Top tenth | $70,010 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Fence Erectors, state by state
The national median for this job
45states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Georgia · $36,990 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Alaska · $64,600 |
| Spread | $27,610 |
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 | $37,270 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $38,353 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| AK | $64,600 | $54,086 | $53,174 |
| MT | $55,720 | $45,089 | $49,963 |
| PA | $58,600 | $47,466 | $48,683 |
| IA | $52,510 | $42,988 | $48,428 |
| LA | $51,770 | $42,610 | $48,232 |
| ND | $49,310 | $41,801 | $47,194 |
| SD | $48,380 | $41,053 | $46,601 |
| MN | $57,260 | $45,818 | $46,555 |
| NE | $50,120 | $40,875 | $45,227 |
| WI | $51,410 | $41,807 | $44,907 |
| AR | $46,150 | $38,013 | $43,941 |
| OH | $47,870 | $40,043 | $43,615 |
| NJ | $56,690 | $46,146 | $42,381 |
| IN | $47,520 | $38,990 | $42,296 |
| KS | $47,130 | $37,708 | $41,914 |
| TN | $45,330 | $38,603 | $41,726 |
| WV | $45,040 | $37,135 | $41,366 |
| UT | $48,720 | $39,158 | $41,219 |
| CT | $53,180 | $42,735 | $41,215 |
| NV | $46,940 | $39,896 | $41,139 |
| IL | $50,710 | $40,560 | $41,030 |
| DE | $50,630 | $40,618 | $40,924 |
| NM | $44,450 | $36,952 | $40,882 |
| NH | $50,850 | $43,038 | $40,854 |
| CA | $56,060 | $45,668 | $40,565 |
| WA | $51,860 | $43,850 | $40,391 |
| MI | $45,800 | $37,285 | $39,587 |
| CO | $48,380 | $39,633 | $39,093 |
| MO | $43,290 | $35,866 | $39,086 |
| AZ | $46,270 | $38,604 | $38,182 |
| ME | $45,310 | $36,848 | $37,950 |
| RI | $46,450 | $38,181 | $37,649 |
| WY | $39,750 | $34,119 | $37,556 |
| FL | $45,550 | $38,779 | $37,485 |
| MS | $38,700 | $31,819 | $36,452 |
| AL | $39,820 | $32,479 | $36,100 |
| MA | $48,430 | $38,992 | $36,024 |
| NY | $48,000 | $38,753 | $36,007 |
| OK | $37,870 | $31,405 | $35,572 |
| SC | $37,960 | $32,224 | $34,584 |
| NC | $39,100 | $32,545 | $34,572 |
| OR | $44,580 | $34,649 | $33,087 |
| TX | $37,270 | $32,126 | $33,060 |
| VA | $40,050 | $32,818 | $32,574 |
| GA | $36,990 | $30,654 | $31,701 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for fence erectors, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $47,980 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- Take-home figures for fence erectors 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 Alaska, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $54,086.
- Levelling out prices for fence erectors 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 — Georgia sits at the bottom on $31,701.
- All wage figures for fence erectors are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $47,980. Within-state dispersion typically exceeds between-state dispersion in this data, so an individual's expected wage is determined more by experience, sector and employer than by the state comparisons presented here.
- Take-home calculations for fence erectors 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 $54,086, in Alaska. 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 fence erectors 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 Georgia at $31,701. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Georgia anchors the bottom at $31,701 — and the two source series are dated independently.