Insulation Workers, Floor, Ceiling, and Wall
What the pay figures show
- Nebraska pays this job the most, at $73,140. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $63,800 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- Nebraska leads for insulation workers, floor, ceiling, and wall at $73,140 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $63,800 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
$49,120
People doing it
44,440
Highest paid
$73,140
NE
Best off, really
$63,800
NE, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$37,030
Highest tenth
$78,190
Lowest, really
$33,104
WV
States with data
48
National average
$54,740
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
90.38%
NE, 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 $33,104 to $63,800.
- Just 44,440 Americans work in this job. Small fields move around more from year to year.
- This job is not published everywhere — 48 jurisdictions have a figure, with $49,120 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. Nebraska tops the ones that are.
- Geographic dispersion in insulation workers, floor, ceiling, and wall 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 $33,104 to $63,800 — so the variation reflects genuine differences in local labor markets rather than a nominal illusion.
- 44,440 are employed nationally in insulation workers, floor, ceiling, and wall — a small occupation, where the state spread above is more sensitive to sample composition than it would be in a large one.
- 48 jurisdictions carry a published median for insulation workers, floor, ceiling, and wall. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Insulation Workers, Floor, Ceiling, and Wall
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $37,030 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $49,120 |
| Top tenth earn over | $78,190 |
| This salary | $49,120 |
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 Insulation Workers, Floor, Ceiling, and Wall
The national median for this job
$49,120around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $37,030 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $49,120 |
| Top tenth | $78,190 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Insulation Workers, Floor, Ceiling, and Wall, state by state
The national median for this job
48states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | West Virginia · $35,390 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Nebraska · $73,140 |
| Spread | $37,750 |
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 | $48,740 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $50,157 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| NE | $73,140 | $57,660 | $63,800 |
| MS | $62,880 | $50,281 | $57,601 |
| OH | $58,400 | $48,215 | $52,515 |
| WA | $67,750 | $56,492 | $52,037 |
| IA | $55,820 | $45,522 | $51,283 |
| MO | $56,040 | $45,512 | $49,597 |
| IN | $54,630 | $44,493 | $48,266 |
| AK | $56,470 | $47,554 | $46,752 |
| KS | $51,520 | $40,990 | $45,562 |
| VT | $53,570 | $43,685 | $45,206 |
| MD | $58,420 | $46,709 | $44,928 |
| KY | $49,730 | $40,515 | $44,784 |
| ND | $46,450 | $39,503 | $44,599 |
| TN | $48,410 | $41,077 | $44,401 |
| MN | $54,350 | $43,678 | $44,380 |
| LA | $47,340 | $39,184 | $44,353 |
| SD | $45,820 | $38,996 | $44,266 |
| NM | $48,460 | $40,001 | $44,256 |
| OR | $60,210 | $45,841 | $43,774 |
| NY | $59,100 | $47,072 | $43,737 |
| AL | $48,740 | $39,254 | $43,630 |
| MT | $48,100 | $39,324 | $43,576 |
| WI | $49,520 | $40,382 | $43,376 |
| OK | $46,880 | $38,239 | $43,313 |
| WY | $46,200 | $39,302 | $43,261 |
| DE | $53,570 | $42,817 | $43,139 |
| IL | $53,000 | $42,287 | $42,777 |
| TX | $48,740 | $41,343 | $42,544 |
| PA | $50,600 | $41,284 | $42,342 |
| SC | $47,020 | $39,159 | $42,026 |
| AR | $43,730 | $36,158 | $41,797 |
| NH | $51,320 | $43,416 | $41,213 |
| CO | $50,800 | $41,471 | $40,906 |
| NV | $46,510 | $39,551 | $40,782 |
| MI | $46,490 | $37,810 | $40,144 |
| GA | $47,810 | $38,808 | $40,133 |
| ME | $47,790 | $38,673 | $39,830 |
| NJ | $52,750 | $43,198 | $39,674 |
| FL | $47,100 | $40,025 | $38,689 |
| CT | $48,550 | $39,255 | $37,859 |
| NC | $42,990 | $35,516 | $37,727 |
| ID | $41,550 | $34,217 | $37,426 |
| MA | $48,940 | $39,376 | $36,379 |
| VA | $44,810 | $36,369 | $36,099 |
| CA | $48,840 | $40,300 | $35,796 |
| AZ | $42,210 | $35,443 | $35,056 |
| UT | $40,080 | $32,601 | $34,316 |
| WV | $35,390 | $29,718 | $33,104 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for this job as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $49,120, 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 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 Nebraska, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $57,660.
- The price adjustment for this job uses a statewide figure, and states are not uniform. A city and a rural county in the same state can differ more from each other than two states do, so treat the real-terms comparison as a direction rather than a precise answer — West Virginia anchors the bottom at $33,104. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- These are distribution medians for insulation workers, floor, ceiling, and wall, with a national value of $49,120. 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 insulation workers, floor, ceiling, and wall 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 $57,660, in Nebraska. 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 figures for insulation workers, floor, ceiling, and wall deflate take-home by a statewide regional price parity, which conceals substantial intra-state variation — metropolitan and non-metropolitan price levels within one state frequently differ by more than two states differ from each other. The wage and price series also carry different reference periods, as each is published on its own schedule, so the adjustment is directionally sound rather than precisely dated.