Occupation / job
Floor Sanders and Finishers
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
With a $50,440 median against a $50,020 national one, Floor Sanders and Finishers is an average-paying occupation by construction — $35 a month either way. What separates it from the alternatives is not on this line.
Employment as Floor Sanders and Finishers stands at 3,720. 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.
These trades suit people who want a skill that is portable, credentialed by doing rather than by studying, and demonstrably useful to somebody in every town.
We carry no verified training length for Floor Sanders and Finishers — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
Between $41,600 and $59,620 there is $18,020, a ratio of 1.4x. Tight distributions are predictable, and predictable cuts both ways: little risk of being badly underpaid, little prospect of doing much better.
A quarter of Floor Sanders and Finishers earn less than $41,600, $8,420 off the $50,020 national midpoint — $20.00 an hour. The floor here is close enough to ordinary that the case against this work, if there is one, is not financial.
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 3,720 people employed as Floor Sanders and Finishers; 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.
What the spread tells you
Top quarter to bottom quarter is 1.4x. In a band that narrow, $50,440 is a genuinely representative number for Floor Sanders and Finishers and the main variable left is where you live.
The middle half of this field earns between $41,600 and $59,620. That is $18,020 of range, with $50,440 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Getting to $59,620, the 75th percentile, is worth $9,180 a year more than the $50,440 midpoint and $18,020 more than the $41,600 a quarter of Floor Sanders and Finishers settle for.
$50,440 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $8,840 above the bottom quarter, $9,180 below the top one. A symmetric distribution like this is the case where the median genuinely does describe the typical person.
Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $24.25 at the midpoint for Floor Sanders and Finishers, $20.00 at the 25th percentile and $28.66 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.
What these figures are, and what they are not
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Floor Sanders and Finishers. The self-employed are excluded, so $50,440 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Floor Sanders and Finishers, the hourly figure is $50,440 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