Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters
What the pay figures show
- A job board will not tell you this about this job. The best headline number is the District of Columbia, at $101,020. State taxes differ, so Alaska leaves you more. Prices differ too, so Illinois leaves you better off again — $75,203 once levelled out. Moving for the biggest salary can leave you worse off.
- Wage data for plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters places the District of Columbia first at $101,020. That position is not robust: state income tax alone reorders it to Alaska, and regional price parity reorders it again to Illinois at $75,203. 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
Choose your filing status and local taxes, compare pay, and keep a shortlist.Compare wage and personal-pay outcomes by state, with selected resident local taxes and saved career choices.
Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$63,800
People doing it
465,840
Highest paid
$101,020
DC
Best off, really
$75,203
IL, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$44,150
Highest tenth
$108,420
Lowest, really
$43,202
FL
States with data
51
National average
$72,170
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
98.86%
IL, 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 $43,202 up to $75,203.
- About 465,840 Americans work in this job, on a middle wage of $63,800. Big enough that where you live changes the arithmetic.
- Every state reports this one. All 51 jurisdictions publish a figure, and the middle wage is $63,800, so the comparison above leaves nobody out.
- The nominal spread for plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $43,202 to $75,203, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- With 465,840 workers, plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters sits in the middle of the BLS headcount distribution. The state-level spread described above therefore applies to a meaningful population rather than a niche one.
- All 51 jurisdictions publish an occupational median for plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters, so the spread described above is a complete national range rather than a range across a reported subset.
Pay band: Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $44,150 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $63,800 |
| Top tenth earn over | $108,420 |
| This salary | $63,800 |
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 Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters
The national median for this job
$63,800around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $44,150 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $63,800 |
| Top tenth | $108,420 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $48,660 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $101,020 |
| Spread | $52,360 |
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 | $59,840 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $61,580 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| IL | $99,950 | $74,342 | $75,203 |
| AK | $93,920 | $74,903 | $73,640 |
| MN | $94,410 | $70,351 | $71,483 |
| MT | $79,960 | $61,925 | $68,620 |
| WI | $81,210 | $62,595 | $67,236 |
| DC | $101,020 | $74,279 | $67,037 |
| OR | $97,050 | $69,163 | $66,045 |
| MI | $80,190 | $62,086 | $65,920 |
| IN | $76,320 | $60,299 | $65,412 |
| MA | $93,880 | $70,501 | $65,135 |
| WA | $81,030 | $65,835 | $60,642 |
| ND | $63,560 | $53,250 | $60,121 |
| RI | $76,470 | $60,179 | $59,341 |
| LA | $63,680 | $51,823 | $58,659 |
| MO | $66,790 | $53,615 | $58,428 |
| IA | $63,890 | $51,700 | $58,242 |
| WY | $62,410 | $52,326 | $57,598 |
| CT | $77,280 | $59,696 | $57,572 |
| KY | $64,160 | $51,605 | $57,042 |
| KS | $65,220 | $51,234 | $56,948 |
| OH | $63,330 | $52,040 | $56,682 |
| NJ | $78,240 | $61,078 | $56,095 |
| PA | $68,080 | $54,634 | $56,035 |
| NY | $77,490 | $59,757 | $55,523 |
| NM | $61,440 | $49,825 | $55,125 |
| HI | $78,060 | $59,256 | $54,559 |
| NE | $60,970 | $49,099 | $54,327 |
| NV | $61,610 | $51,684 | $53,293 |
| TN | $58,600 | $49,265 | $53,251 |
| NH | $66,810 | $55,831 | $52,998 |
| OK | $57,970 | $46,651 | $52,840 |
| ME | $64,000 | $50,604 | $52,117 |
| AL | $58,670 | $46,796 | $52,013 |
| VT | $62,170 | $50,141 | $51,887 |
| UT | $61,900 | $49,162 | $51,748 |
| TX | $59,840 | $50,261 | $51,723 |
| DE | $64,720 | $51,142 | $51,527 |
| WV | $56,980 | $46,225 | $51,491 |
| MS | $55,480 | $44,631 | $51,128 |
| CA | $72,830 | $57,312 | $50,907 |
| AZ | $62,070 | $50,904 | $50,348 |
| CO | $63,240 | $50,919 | $50,225 |
| MD | $65,400 | $51,986 | $50,003 |
| SD | $51,620 | $43,657 | $49,556 |
| NC | $57,080 | $46,275 | $49,156 |
| VA | $60,470 | $48,051 | $47,694 |
| SC | $53,940 | $44,260 | $47,501 |
| GA | $57,200 | $45,885 | $47,451 |
| ID | $52,380 | $42,344 | $46,316 |
| AR | $48,660 | $39,936 | $46,165 |
| FL | $52,910 | $44,693 | $43,202 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for this job, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $63,800 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- 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 $74,903.
- 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 Florida, on $43,202.
- All wage figures for plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $63,800. 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 plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters 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 $74,903, 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 plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters 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; Florida anchors the distribution at $43,202. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.