Structural Metal Fabricators and Fitters
What the pay figures show
- A job board will not tell you this about this job. The best headline number is Maine, at $64,760. State taxes differ, so Alaska leaves you more. Prices differ too, so Indiana leaves you better off again — $52,925 once levelled out. Moving for the biggest salary can leave you worse off.
- Wage data for structural metal fabricators and fitters places Maine first at $64,760. That position is not robust: state income tax alone reorders it to Alaska, and regional price parity reorders it again to Indiana at $52,925. 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
$51,330
People doing it
52,360
Highest paid
$64,760
ME
Best off, really
$52,925
IN, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$37,960
Highest tenth
$72,280
Lowest, really
$32,609
HI
States with data
47
National average
$54,030
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
92.18%
IN, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job is fairly steady around the country. Count tax and local prices and the states bunch closer still, from $32,609 to $52,925. For work like this, where you live changes your life more than it changes your pay.
- This is a small job: about 52,360 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- Some states are missing here. There are figures for 47 jurisdictions, averaging $51,330 in the middle. A blank means nobody published a number, not that the job pays nothing there. Maine leads the published set.
- Geographic dispersion in structural metal fabricators and fitters is moderate by national standards. Tax and price adjustment compress the distribution further, to a real range of $32,609 through $52,925. Where nominal spread is this contained, relocation decisions in the occupation turn on non-wage factors, because the wage differential does not survive the adjustments in a form large enough to drive them.
- With 52,360 workers, structural metal fabricators and fitters 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.
- Coverage for structural metal fabricators and fitters runs to 47 jurisdictions, short of the full set. The omitted states are suppressed at source; treat the spread above as the range across reported states rather than across the country.
Pay band: Structural Metal Fabricators and Fitters
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $37,960 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $51,330 |
| Top tenth earn over | $72,280 |
| This salary | $51,330 |
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 Structural Metal Fabricators and Fitters
The national median for this job
$51,330around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $37,960 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $51,330 |
| Top tenth | $72,280 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Structural Metal Fabricators and Fitters, state by state
The national median for this job
47states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Nevada · $39,570 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Maine · $64,760 |
| Spread | $25,190 |
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 | $48,490 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $49,900 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| IN | $60,180 | $48,789 | $52,925 |
| ME | $64,760 | $51,163 | $52,693 |
| AK | $63,420 | $53,138 | $52,242 |
| ND | $54,430 | $45,915 | $51,839 |
| ID | $58,140 | $46,667 | $51,044 |
| KY | $55,250 | $44,757 | $49,473 |
| WI | $56,310 | $45,503 | $48,877 |
| SD | $50,800 | $42,998 | $48,808 |
| WY | $51,740 | $43,753 | $48,161 |
| WA | $61,850 | $51,876 | $47,785 |
| MO | $53,610 | $43,673 | $47,594 |
| IA | $51,360 | $42,108 | $47,436 |
| OH | $52,300 | $43,481 | $47,359 |
| AL | $52,220 | $41,897 | $46,568 |
| OK | $50,380 | $40,894 | $46,320 |
| TN | $50,460 | $42,725 | $46,181 |
| LA | $49,120 | $40,561 | $45,912 |
| MN | $56,210 | $45,046 | $45,770 |
| MA | $62,040 | $49,247 | $45,499 |
| CT | $58,760 | $46,912 | $45,243 |
| OR | $62,220 | $47,280 | $45,148 |
| IL | $55,380 | $44,081 | $44,592 |
| NM | $48,700 | $40,184 | $44,458 |
| NE | $48,820 | $39,889 | $44,137 |
| NH | $53,920 | $45,505 | $43,196 |
| PA | $51,640 | $42,087 | $43,167 |
| WV | $46,880 | $38,536 | $42,926 |
| VA | $53,940 | $43,180 | $42,859 |
| NC | $48,990 | $40,097 | $42,594 |
| KS | $47,840 | $38,239 | $42,504 |
| TX | $48,490 | $41,142 | $42,338 |
| SC | $46,910 | $39,078 | $41,939 |
| GA | $50,010 | $40,466 | $41,848 |
| NJ | $55,650 | $45,368 | $41,667 |
| CA | $57,590 | $46,806 | $41,575 |
| MI | $47,950 | $38,921 | $41,324 |
| CO | $51,120 | $41,714 | $41,145 |
| NY | $55,080 | $44,059 | $40,938 |
| UT | $48,130 | $38,711 | $40,747 |
| MS | $42,550 | $34,759 | $39,819 |
| AZ | $48,150 | $40,067 | $39,629 |
| AR | $41,260 | $34,264 | $39,608 |
| MD | $50,110 | $40,427 | $38,885 |
| FL | $46,880 | $39,848 | $38,518 |
| DE | $46,940 | $37,858 | $38,143 |
| NV | $39,570 | $33,974 | $35,032 |
| HI | $43,750 | $35,417 | $32,609 |
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 $51,330.
- The take-home numbers here use the simplest possible household: one filer for this job, no children, no pension contributions, standard deduction. Real life usually reduces the tax bill below this. City and school-district income taxes are left out, and in Ohio or Pennsylvania that is a real omission. The best after-tax state here is Alaska, at $53,138.
- 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 — Hawaii anchors the bottom at $32,609. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for structural metal fabricators and fitters, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $51,330, 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.
- Retained-pay figures for structural metal fabricators and fitters model a single filer taking the standard deduction with no dependants and no pre-tax deferrals — deliberately the simplest household, so the comparison across states isolates geography rather than personal circumstances. Local income taxes are outside the model; Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland residents should expect a meaningfully lower figure than $53,138, which leads in Alaska.
- Real-terms figures for structural metal fabricators and fitters 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.