Construction Laborers

Construction Laborers pays $47,120, effectively level with the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — $2,900 apart, which is inside the noise of a single year’s survey. Treat this as an average-paying occupation and decide it on everything else.

With 1,096,780 employed, this is one of the biggest occupations in the country. Work at this scale is always available and rarely scarce, and the wage on this page is what that combination produces.

This work suits people who like finishing something physical, can work in weather, and are content that the site rather than the office sets the hours.

How long it takes to become one of the 1,096,780 people doing this is not something we have a source for. BLS counts and pays them; it does not record how they got there, and we would rather say so than guess.

$38,620 to $59,740 — 1.5x, or $1,760 a month between the quarters. An unremarkable spread, which means the useful planning number for Construction Laborers is the bottom of it rather than the middle.

A quarter of the field earns under $38,620 — $11,400 below the $50,020 the typical American job pays. That is the number to plan on for a first year, not the midpoint.

Avoid it if you have an existing back, knee or shoulder injury, or if intermittent layoffs between projects would be unmanageable.

There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 1,096,780 people employed as Construction Laborers; it did not count the people who trained for it and are doing something else, and a rate built without that denominator would be a number we made up.

At 1.5x between $38,620 and $59,740 this is a normally shaped occupation. $47,120 is what the middle of Construction Laborers earns after the years it takes to get there, which is not the same as what it offers you now.

In cash terms the middle half of Construction Laborers runs $38,620 to $59,740 — $21,120 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $47,120.

Between $38,620 and $59,740 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $47,120. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $12,620; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $21,120.

The climb from $47,120 to $59,740 is $12,620, against $8,500 down to $38,620. Rather more of the range sits above the midpoint than below it, so the realistic upside in Construction Laborers is larger than the realistic downside.

Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $18.56 at the bottom quarter, $22.65 at the midpoint, $28.72 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.