Occupation / job
Roofers
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
Roofers pays $55,440 against $50,020 across all occupations, which is $451 a month ahead. A modest premium, and modest premiums are usually attached to modest requirements — check what this one is attached to.
135,490 people are employed as Roofers. 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 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.
No verified preparation time is on file for Roofers. 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 $46,260 and $65,390 there is $19,130, 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.
At $46,260 — $22.24 an hour — the 25th percentile of this field sits essentially at the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint. Being in the bottom quarter of Roofers still means being paid like the average American worker.
Avoid it if you have an existing back, knee or shoulder injury, or if intermittent layoffs between projects would be unmanageable.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 135,490 figure counts people already working as Roofers, 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, $55,440 is a genuinely representative number for Roofers and the main variable left is where you live.
In cash terms the middle half of Roofers runs $46,260 to $65,390 — $19,130 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $55,440.
Getting to $65,390, the 75th percentile, is worth $9,950 a year more than the $55,440 midpoint and $19,130 more than the $46,260 a quarter of Roofers settle for.
$9,180 down to $46,260, $9,950 up to $65,390: the midpoint of Roofers is centred in its own middle half. That symmetry is why the median and the average would say much the same thing here, which is not true of most pages on this site.
Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $26.65 at the midpoint for Roofers, $22.24 at the 25th percentile and $31.43 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $55,440 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.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $55,440 because we have no verified record of unpaid hours or out-of-pocket costs for this work, and we would rather convert honestly than adjust invented ones.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else