Sheet Metal Workers
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for sheet metal workers is Washington, at $98,550. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and Alaska comes out ahead, worth $74,110. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for sheet metal workers: Washington leads at $98,550 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting Alaska to $74,110 in real terms. Price level, not tax, is the operative variable for this occupation — and it is the one absent from essentially every published wage comparison.
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
$61,800
People doing it
119,770
Highest paid
$98,550
WA
Best off, really
$74,110
AK, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$38,630
Highest tenth
$105,650
Lowest, really
$40,662
FL
States with data
50
National average
$67,850
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
101.72%
AK, 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 $40,662 to $74,110.
- About 119,770 Americans work in this job, on a middle wage of $61,800. Big enough that where you live changes the arithmetic.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 50 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $61,800. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, Washington pays most.
- Geographic dispersion in sheet metal workers 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 $40,662 to $74,110 — so the variation reflects genuine differences in local labor markets rather than a nominal illusion.
- With 119,770 workers, sheet metal workers 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.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for sheet metal workers in 50 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: Sheet Metal Workers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $38,630 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $61,800 |
| Top tenth earn over | $105,650 |
| This salary | $61,800 |
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 Sheet Metal Workers
The national median for this job
$61,800around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $38,630 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $61,800 |
| Top tenth | $105,650 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Sheet Metal Workers, state by state
The national median for this job
50states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $45,820 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Washington · $98,550 |
| Spread | $52,730 |
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 | $54,240 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $55,817 |
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 | $94,600 | $75,381 | $74,110 |
| WA | $98,550 | $78,160 | $71,996 |
| IL | $86,630 | $65,631 | $66,391 |
| OH | $74,790 | $60,104 | $65,465 |
| HI | $96,350 | $70,733 | $65,126 |
| WI | $77,760 | $60,373 | $64,849 |
| NJ | $92,840 | $70,419 | $64,674 |
| WV | $72,390 | $57,330 | $63,862 |
| ND | $65,180 | $54,540 | $61,577 |
| IA | $66,460 | $53,667 | $60,458 |
| OK | $65,640 | $52,468 | $59,430 |
| CT | $78,750 | $60,649 | $58,492 |
| MA | $82,100 | $62,802 | $58,022 |
| MN | $72,970 | $56,726 | $57,638 |
| NE | $64,440 | $51,729 | $57,238 |
| IN | $64,040 | $51,776 | $56,166 |
| MO | $63,560 | $51,200 | $55,797 |
| KS | $62,670 | $49,327 | $54,829 |
| MT | $61,420 | $49,401 | $54,742 |
| MI | $64,490 | $51,508 | $54,688 |
| WY | $58,740 | $49,378 | $54,352 |
| KY | $60,680 | $48,930 | $54,086 |
| TN | $59,170 | $49,723 | $53,746 |
| NY | $73,760 | $57,334 | $53,272 |
| CA | $76,590 | $59,656 | $52,990 |
| UT | $63,140 | $50,103 | $52,739 |
| OR | $73,750 | $54,810 | $52,339 |
| RI | $65,100 | $52,467 | $51,736 |
| NM | $56,720 | $46,254 | $51,174 |
| PA | $61,400 | $49,630 | $50,902 |
| ME | $62,120 | $49,220 | $50,692 |
| DE | $61,460 | $48,719 | $49,086 |
| VT | $58,250 | $47,250 | $48,895 |
| MD | $62,560 | $49,839 | $47,938 |
| NH | $59,800 | $50,229 | $47,681 |
| GA | $56,800 | $45,583 | $47,139 |
| TX | $54,240 | $45,762 | $47,092 |
| LA | $50,320 | $41,489 | $46,962 |
| CO | $57,880 | $46,848 | $46,210 |
| SD | $47,800 | $40,587 | $46,072 |
| MS | $49,500 | $40,065 | $45,898 |
| SC | $49,920 | $41,297 | $44,321 |
| NC | $50,730 | $41,426 | $44,005 |
| AR | $45,820 | $37,760 | $43,649 |
| AL | $47,530 | $38,335 | $42,609 |
| VA | $52,220 | $41,897 | $41,585 |
| ID | $46,350 | $37,819 | $41,366 |
| AZ | $50,260 | $41,710 | $41,254 |
| NV | $46,730 | $39,728 | $40,965 |
| FL | $49,640 | $42,066 | $40,662 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for sheet metal workers, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $61,800 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- Take-home figures for sheet metal workers 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 Washington, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $78,160.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for sheet metal workers. 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 $40,662.
- All wage figures for sheet metal workers are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $61,800. 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 sheet metal workers 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 $78,160, in Washington. 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 sheet metal workers 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 $40,662. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.