Occupation / job
Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers, All Other
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 $49,230 median against $50,020 across all occupations puts Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers, All Other within $65 a month of the exact middle of the American labour market. Nothing in the headline number argues either way.
176,300 people are employed as Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers, All Other. At that size there is a real ladder and enough churn that experience can be sold to a competitor rather than only accumulated where you are.
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 176,300 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
The middle half runs $42,170 to $61,900 — $1,644 a month between the quarters, a 1.5x ratio. Spreads this narrow are usually set by a grade or a scale, so the negotiation you are imagining probably is not available.
A quarter of Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers, All Other earn less than $42,170, $7,850 off the $50,020 national midpoint — $20.27 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 need to be off duty; this is a category of work that gets called at inconvenient hours by definition.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 176,300 figure counts people already working as Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers, All Other, 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
The quarters are $42,170 and $61,900, a ratio of 1.5x. In a distribution this narrow, the biggest single lever on your pay in Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers, All Other is the cost of living where you do it.
In cash terms the middle half of Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers, All Other runs $42,170 to $61,900 — $19,730 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $49,230.
The 75th percentile is $61,900. Reaching it from the $49,230 midpoint is $12,670 a year; reaching it from the $42,170 that the bottom quarter of Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers, All Other earn is $19,730.
The distance from the midpoint up to $61,900 is $12,670 — well over the $7,060 down to $42,170. Distributions leaning this way mean the median understates what the upper half of Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers, All Other earns, and half the field is in that upper half.
Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $23.66 at the midpoint for Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers, All Other, $20.27 at the 25th percentile and $29.75 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $49,230 figure is what employers pay employees. It is before tax and before deductions, it excludes the self-employed entirely, and it says nothing about anyone who does this work on their own account.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers, All Other, the hourly figure is $49,230 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