Occupation / job
Pipelayers
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
Pipelayers pays $49,000, effectively level with the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — $1,020 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.
33,050 people do this work nationally. That is the size at which Pipelayers becomes a career rather than a post — enough employers in a normal city that leaving one of them is a decision rather than a crisis.
The building trades suit people who want to be paid to learn a craft rather than pay to learn a subject, and who can plan around work that stops when the project or the weather does.
No verified preparation time is on file for Pipelayers. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.
Who should not do this
Between $43,980 and $61,400 there is $17,420, 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.
Even the bottom quarter, under $43,980, lands within $6,040 of the $50,020 typical American wage. The downside of Pipelayers is not really the money.
Avoid it if a gap between projects would leave you without income you could not cover.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 33,050 figure counts people already working as Pipelayers, 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
Top quarter to bottom quarter is 1.4x. In a band that narrow, $49,000 is a genuinely representative number for Pipelayers and the main variable left is where you live.
The middle half of this field earns between $43,980 and $61,400. That is $17,420 of range, with $49,000 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
The 75th percentile is $61,400. Reaching it from the $49,000 midpoint is $12,400 a year; reaching it from the $43,980 that the bottom quarter of Pipelayers earn is $17,420.
From $49,000 the drop to $43,980 is $5,020 and the climb to $61,400 is $12,400. When the upper half of the range is that much longer, the average is pulled well above the median — which is exactly why this site publishes the median.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $21.14 at the bottom quarter, $23.55 at the midpoint, $29.51 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
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Pipelayers. The self-employed are excluded, so $49,000 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
The hourly number on this page is $49,000 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Pipelayers, so it is arithmetic rather than an effective rate.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else