Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Mechanics and Installers
What the pay figures show
- The District of Columbia pays this job the most, $84,390. It still pays the most after tax. What it does not do is stay ahead once you count what living there costs. Level that out and North Dakota wins, at $68,916. Same work. A wage that goes further.
- For heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration mechanics and installers, the District of Columbia leads both nominally at $84,390 and after tax — state income tax differentials are not large enough here to disturb the ordering. Regional price parity is: deflating take-home by each state's price level puts North Dakota first at $68,916. The adjustment that matters for this occupation is therefore cost of living rather than tax, which is the opposite of the assumption most relocation comparisons start from.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$61,010
People doing it
409,670
Highest paid
$84,390
DC
Best off, really
$68,916
ND, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$40,050
Highest tenth
$95,210
Lowest, really
$43,318
AL
States with data
51
National average
$64,780
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.57%
ND, 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 $43,318 and $68,916. That is a real difference. It is not usually a moving-house difference.
- Roughly 409,670 people hold this job nationally, earning $61,010 in the middle. A solid, ordinary-sized job.
- Every state reports this one. All 51 jurisdictions publish a figure, and the middle wage is $61,010, so the comparison above leaves nobody out.
- Interstate variation for heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration mechanics and installers is contained relative to other occupations, and narrows further under adjustment: the real range is $43,318 to $68,916. 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.
- 409,670 are employed nationally in heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration mechanics and installers, placing it well inside the reported range without approaching the highest-headcount occupations.
- All 51 jurisdictions publish an occupational median for heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration mechanics and installers, so the spread described above is a complete national range rather than a range across a reported subset.
Pay band: Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Mechanics and Installers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $40,050 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $61,010 |
| Top tenth earn over | $95,210 |
| This salary | $61,010 |
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 Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Mechanics and Installers
The national median for this job
$61,010around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $40,050 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $61,010 |
| Top tenth | $95,210 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Mechanics and Installers, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $48,110 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $84,390 |
| Spread | $36,280 |
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 | $57,760 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $59,439 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ND | $74,490 | $61,040 | $68,916 |
| AK | $77,430 | $63,302 | $62,235 |
| IL | $77,410 | $59,601 | $60,291 |
| MN | $76,350 | $58,874 | $59,821 |
| SD | $61,390 | $51,507 | $58,467 |
| DC | $84,390 | $63,994 | $57,754 |
| NH | $73,850 | $60,783 | $57,699 |
| WA | $75,660 | $62,057 | $57,163 |
| CT | $76,610 | $59,262 | $57,153 |
| OH | $62,510 | $51,404 | $55,988 |
| IA | $60,680 | $49,242 | $55,474 |
| MA | $77,300 | $59,666 | $55,124 |
| MT | $60,850 | $48,970 | $54,264 |
| LA | $58,650 | $47,932 | $54,255 |
| NJ | $74,450 | $58,640 | $53,856 |
| NY | $74,430 | $57,769 | $53,676 |
| NE | $59,850 | $48,250 | $53,388 |
| RI | $67,370 | $54,118 | $53,365 |
| WI | $61,710 | $49,555 | $53,230 |
| IN | $60,430 | $48,982 | $53,135 |
| MD | $70,020 | $55,127 | $53,024 |
| KS | $60,460 | $47,675 | $52,992 |
| MO | $59,950 | $48,470 | $52,821 |
| OK | $57,560 | $46,340 | $52,488 |
| NV | $60,510 | $50,800 | $52,382 |
| KY | $58,620 | $47,347 | $52,336 |
| VT | $62,150 | $50,126 | $51,871 |
| MI | $60,850 | $48,738 | $51,747 |
| PA | $62,400 | $50,403 | $51,695 |
| CO | $65,200 | $52,408 | $51,693 |
| ME | $63,170 | $49,993 | $51,488 |
| WY | $54,700 | $46,131 | $50,779 |
| CA | $72,560 | $57,144 | $50,758 |
| TN | $55,490 | $46,766 | $50,550 |
| TX | $57,760 | $48,590 | $50,003 |
| DE | $62,320 | $49,362 | $49,734 |
| SC | $56,610 | $46,228 | $49,613 |
| ID | $56,240 | $45,241 | $49,485 |
| NC | $57,260 | $46,412 | $49,302 |
| UT | $58,730 | $46,756 | $49,216 |
| AZ | $59,400 | $48,825 | $48,292 |
| HI | $65,450 | $51,238 | $47,177 |
| VA | $59,730 | $47,499 | $47,146 |
| GA | $56,390 | $45,274 | $46,820 |
| FL | $56,670 | $47,714 | $46,122 |
| NM | $50,270 | $41,375 | $45,776 |
| AR | $48,110 | $39,515 | $45,678 |
| OR | $62,940 | $47,795 | $45,641 |
| MS | $48,680 | $39,439 | $45,181 |
| WV | $48,850 | $40,035 | $44,597 |
| AL | $48,370 | $38,973 | $43,318 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of this job 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 $61,010.
- Take-home figures for this job 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 the District of Columbia, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $63,994.
- Levelling out prices for this job 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 — Alabama sits at the bottom on $43,318.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration mechanics and installers, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $61,010, 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 heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration mechanics and 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 $63,994, in the District of Columbia. 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 heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration mechanics and 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 Alabama at $43,318. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Alabama anchors the bottom at $43,318 — and the two source series are dated independently.