Occupation / job
Refractory Materials Repairers, Except Brickmasons
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
The $61,290 midpoint sits $5.41 an hour above the $50,020 typical American job. That is a 23% premium, and premiums are rationed: whatever rations this one is the thing standing between you and Refractory Materials Repairers, Except Brickmasons.
1,080 people work as Refractory Materials Repairers, Except Brickmasons nationally — small enough that a whole metro may hold a handful of positions, so relocation is frequently the price of entry and of every promotion after it.
These maintenance roles suit diagnosticians: people who enjoy finding out why something failed and are unbothered by being called when it is already broken and someone is already angry.
How long it takes to become one of the 1,080 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
Between $50,050 and $75,000 there is $24,950, a ratio of 1.5x. Tight distributions are predictable, and predictable cuts both ways: little risk of being badly underpaid, little prospect of doing much better.
The 25th percentile is $50,050, $30 above the $50,020 typical American job. A floor above the national midpoint is rare, and it is worth more than an equivalent amount of upside.
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 1,080 figure counts people already working as Refractory Materials Repairers, Except Brickmasons, 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 1.5x. In a band that narrow, $61,290 is a genuinely representative number for Refractory Materials Repairers, Except Brickmasons and the main variable left is where you live.
The middle half of this field earns between $50,050 and $75,000. That is $24,950 of range, with $61,290 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
The 75th percentile is $75,000. Reaching it from the $61,290 midpoint is $13,710 a year; reaching it from the $50,050 that the bottom quarter of Refractory Materials Repairers, Except Brickmasons earn is $24,950.
The climb from $61,290 to $75,000 is $13,710; the drop to $50,050 is $11,240. A little more room above the midpoint than below it is the normal shape for Refractory Materials Repairers, Except Brickmasons and for most paid work, and it is the reason the median is the honest summary rather than the average.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $24.06 at the bottom quarter, $29.46 at the midpoint, $36.05 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 Refractory Materials Repairers, Except Brickmasons. The self-employed are excluded, so $61,290 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Refractory Materials Repairers, Except Brickmasons, the hourly figure is $61,290 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