Occupation / job
Explosives Workers, Ordnance Handling Experts, and Blasters
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
A $61,390 midpoint puts Explosives Workers, Ordnance Handling Experts, and Blasters $11,370 above the $50,020 typical American job — a 23% premium paid for the training, the licence or the conditions. It is not free money and it disappears the moment you stop meeting the requirement.
Employment as Explosives Workers, Ordnance Handling Experts, and Blasters stands at 5,100. That is small enough that your local market may have a dozen posts in total; mobility will matter more to your earnings than seniority does.
Extraction work suits people who will go where the deposit is, work a rotation away from home, and treat the safety regime as the actual condition of employment.
How long it takes to become one of the 5,100 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.
Who should not do this
From $49,630 to $80,370 is $2,561 a month, or 1.6x bottom quarter to top. An ordinary spread like this is mostly years and geography; assume you enter near the bottom of it and that closing the gap takes a career rather than a move.
The bottom quarter of Explosives Workers, Ordnance Handling Experts, and Blasters still clears $49,630 — $390 above the $50,020 typical job. A high floor is the most valuable and least advertised property an occupation can have.
Avoid it if working a rotation away from home would not be sustainable for the people you live with.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 5,100 figure counts people already working as Explosives Workers, Ordnance Handling Experts, and Blasters, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
At 1.6x between $49,630 and $80,370 this is a normally shaped occupation. $61,390 is what the middle of Explosives Workers, Ordnance Handling Experts, and Blasters earns after the years it takes to get there, which is not the same as what it offers you now.
The middle half of this field earns between $49,630 and $80,370. That is $30,740 of range, with $61,390 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
The 75th percentile is $80,370. Reaching it from the $61,390 midpoint is $18,980 a year; reaching it from the $49,630 that the bottom quarter of Explosives Workers, Ordnance Handling Experts, and Blasters earn is $30,740.
The distance from the midpoint up to $80,370 is $18,980 — well over the $11,760 down to $49,630. Distributions leaning this way mean the median understates what the upper half of Explosives Workers, Ordnance Handling Experts, and Blasters earns, and half the field is in that upper half.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $23.86 at the bottom quarter, $29.51 at the midpoint, $38.63 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
This is payroll data: it comes from employers, about people they employ. Anyone doing the work of Explosives Workers, Ordnance Handling Experts, and Blasters for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $61,390 describes them.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Explosives Workers, Ordnance Handling Experts, and Blasters, the hourly figure is $61,390 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else