Motorboat Mechanics and Service Technicians
What the pay figures show
- A job board will not tell you this about this job. The best headline number is Hawaii, at $77,740. State taxes differ, so Alaska leaves you more. Prices differ too, so Vermont leaves you better off again — $59,051 once levelled out. Moving for the biggest salary can leave you worse off.
- Wage data for motorboat mechanics and service technicians places Hawaii first at $77,740. That position is not robust: state income tax alone reorders it to Alaska, and regional price parity reorders it again to Vermont at $59,051. Because published comparisons almost universally stop at the nominal median, the state that appears best for this occupation is routinely not the state where a worker's income goes furthest.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$57,550
People doing it
23,220
Highest paid
$77,740
HI
Best off, really
$59,051
VT, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$36,950
Highest tenth
$79,330
Lowest, really
$34,041
WV
States with data
49
National average
$58,070
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
96.64%
VT, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job roughly doubles depending on the state. That is a lot. Some of it is prices, because dear places pay more to make up for costing more. Most of it is not. In real money the range is still $34,041 to $59,051.
- This is a small job: about 23,220 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 49 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $57,550. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, Hawaii pays most.
- Interstate variation in motorboat mechanics and service technicians pay approaches twofold nominally. The standard explanation — that high-wage states are merely high-cost states — is only partly supported here: after tax and price adjustment the range remains $34,041 to $59,051, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 23,220 workers, motorboat mechanics and service technicians 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 motorboat mechanics and service technicians in 49 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: Motorboat Mechanics and Service Technicians
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $36,950 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $57,550 |
| Top tenth earn over | $79,330 |
| This salary | $57,550 |
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 Motorboat Mechanics and Service Technicians
The national median for this job
$57,550around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $36,950 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $57,550 |
| Top tenth | $79,330 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Motorboat Mechanics and Service Technicians, state by state
The national median for this job
49states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | West Virginia · $36,480 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Hawaii · $77,740 |
| Spread | $41,260 |
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 | $53,290 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $54,839 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| VT | $72,350 | $57,064 | $59,051 |
| AK | $72,520 | $59,848 | $58,839 |
| ND | $60,990 | $51,185 | $57,790 |
| HI | $77,740 | $59,055 | $54,374 |
| MA | $74,160 | $57,614 | $53,229 |
| NJ | $71,880 | $56,974 | $52,326 |
| VA | $63,450 | $50,274 | $49,901 |
| ME | $60,510 | $48,035 | $49,472 |
| LA | $53,080 | $43,624 | $49,379 |
| WI | $56,920 | $45,963 | $49,371 |
| MN | $61,010 | $48,576 | $49,358 |
| WA | $63,020 | $52,817 | $48,651 |
| CT | $63,480 | $50,445 | $48,650 |
| AZ | $59,390 | $48,818 | $48,284 |
| DE | $60,230 | $47,799 | $48,159 |
| OR | $66,460 | $50,316 | $48,047 |
| OH | $52,450 | $43,598 | $47,486 |
| MT | $52,160 | $42,396 | $46,979 |
| RI | $58,470 | $47,388 | $46,728 |
| TX | $53,290 | $44,999 | $46,307 |
| MD | $60,310 | $48,138 | $46,302 |
| IA | $49,930 | $41,013 | $46,203 |
| KY | $50,920 | $41,430 | $45,795 |
| CO | $57,050 | $46,218 | $45,588 |
| IN | $51,200 | $41,838 | $45,386 |
| FL | $55,680 | $46,919 | $45,353 |
| SD | $46,840 | $39,816 | $45,197 |
| TN | $49,120 | $41,648 | $45,017 |
| NH | $56,160 | $47,305 | $44,904 |
| CA | $62,330 | $50,330 | $44,705 |
| NC | $51,430 | $41,961 | $44,573 |
| AR | $45,860 | $37,790 | $43,684 |
| SC | $49,080 | $40,678 | $43,656 |
| NY | $58,940 | $46,953 | $43,626 |
| NV | $49,630 | $42,058 | $43,367 |
| PA | $51,520 | $41,995 | $43,071 |
| ID | $47,740 | $38,862 | $42,507 |
| KS | $47,720 | $38,149 | $42,404 |
| GA | $49,850 | $40,346 | $41,723 |
| MI | $47,900 | $38,883 | $41,284 |
| NE | $45,400 | $37,297 | $41,268 |
| MS | $43,800 | $35,713 | $40,912 |
| AL | $45,250 | $36,603 | $40,684 |
| UT | $46,470 | $37,451 | $39,421 |
| MO | $43,580 | $36,086 | $39,325 |
| IL | $47,840 | $38,396 | $38,841 |
| OK | $39,920 | $32,960 | $37,333 |
| NM | $36,510 | $30,913 | $34,201 |
| WV | $36,480 | $30,560 | $34,041 |
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 $57,550.
- 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 Alaska, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $59,848.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for this job. 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 West Virginia, on $34,041.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for motorboat mechanics and service technicians, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $57,550, 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 motorboat mechanics and service technicians 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 $59,848, 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.
- Real-terms results for motorboat mechanics and service technicians 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; West Virginia anchors the distribution at $34,041. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.