Helpers--Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers

Helpers--Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers pays $39,630 where the typical American job pays $50,020 — $10,390 a year short, or $4.99 an hour. That is a liveable wage in a cheap state and a difficult one in an expensive city, and nothing about the national figure tells you which you would be in.

National employment is 95,580. At that scale hiring is continuous, the market rate is well established, and your leverage comes from being credibly willing to go somewhere else.

These roles suit people who want to be the one who keeps things running, in work where competence is obvious to everyone around you within about a week.

How long it takes to become one of the 95,580 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.

The quarters sit at $34,910 and $46,890, $998 a month apart at a ratio of 1.3x. Narrow enough that what you can expect is close to what everyone else gets.

The bottom quarter of Helpers--Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers earns under $34,910 — $15,110 below the $50,020 national midpoint, or $16.78 an hour. A floor that low means the occupation cannot be judged on its median alone; a quarter of the people in it are somewhere else entirely.

Avoid it if you need to be off duty; this is a category of work that gets called at inconvenient hours by definition.

There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 95,580 people employed as Helpers--Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers; 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 1.3x between $34,910 and $46,890, this is a narrow distribution. $39,630 is a reliable number to plan around, which is worth something — but so is knowing that outperforming the field will not be paid for.

The middle half of this field earns between $34,910 and $46,890. That is $11,980 of range, with $39,630 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.

Between $34,910 and $46,890 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $39,630. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $7,260; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $11,980.

$7,260 separates $39,630 from the $46,890 top quarter, while only $4,720 separates it from $34,910. The range leans upward, which means the middle of Helpers--Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers has more room above it than a symmetric reading of the median would suggest.

On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Helpers--Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers is $19.05 an hour. The quarters sit at $16.78 and $22.54, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.