Occupation / job
Sheet Metal Workers
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 $61,800 midpoint sits $5.66 an hour above the $50,020 typical American job. That is a 24% premium, and premiums are rationed: whatever rations this one is the thing standing between you and Sheet Metal Workers.
National employment is 119,770. At that scale hiring is continuous, the market rate is well established, and your leverage comes from being credibly willing to go somewhere else.
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.
How long it takes to become one of the 119,770 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 quarters sit at $47,830 and $81,610 — 1.7x, or $2,815 a month apart. At that width the occupation contains genuinely different jobs, and which one you are being offered matters more than the title does.
At $47,830, or $22.99 an hour, the bottom quarter of this work lands within $2,190 of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — an unusually solid floor.
Avoid it if a gap between projects would leave you without income you could not cover.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 119,770 is a headcount of the employed, which is a numerator without a denominator — everyone who qualified and never got hired is missing from it, and we will not estimate them to complete a percentage.
What the spread tells you
At 1.7x, the distribution for Sheet Metal Workers is open enough that specialisation starts to pay. The distance from $47,830 to $81,610 is mostly what you can do that others in the same title cannot.
Put in money rather than ratios: $47,830 at the 25th percentile, $61,800 at the midpoint, $81,610 at the 75th. $33,780 separates the quarter of Sheet Metal Workers at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
The 75th percentile is $81,610. Reaching it from the $61,800 midpoint is $19,810 a year; reaching it from the $47,830 that the bottom quarter of Sheet Metal Workers earn is $33,780.
$19,810 separates $61,800 from the $81,610 top quarter, while only $13,970 separates it from $47,830. The range leans upward, which means the middle of Sheet Metal Workers has more room above it than a symmetric reading of the median would suggest.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $22.99 at the bottom quarter, $29.71 at the midpoint, $39.23 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
The $61,800 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 Sheet Metal Workers, the hourly figure is $61,800 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