Occupation / job
Watch and Clock Repairers
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
At $67,230 against a $50,020 midpoint, Watch and Clock Repairers pays $17,210 a year more than the typical American job — $8.27 an hour. Nothing pays that much more for free, and the thing it is paid for is what you should be reading about.
National employment of 1,310 makes Watch and Clock Repairers a rare job rather than an uncommon one. Expect to move for the first post and to move again for the second, because waiting for a local vacancy can mean waiting years.
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.
No verified preparation time is on file for Watch and Clock Repairers. 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
The quarters sit at $47,650 and $91,490 — 1.9x, or $3,653 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 $47,650 — $22.90 an hour — the 25th percentile of this field sits essentially at the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint. Being in the bottom quarter of Watch and Clock Repairers still means being paid like the average American worker.
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 1,310 figure counts people already working as Watch and Clock Repairers, 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
From $47,650 to $91,490 at a ratio of 1.9x is wide enough that two people with the same job title have materially different jobs. $67,230 sits in the middle of that and describes neither of them especially well.
Put in money rather than ratios: $47,650 at the 25th percentile, $67,230 at the midpoint, $91,490 at the 75th. $43,840 separates the quarter of Watch and Clock Repairers at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Getting to $91,490, the 75th percentile, is worth $24,260 a year more than the $67,230 midpoint and $43,840 more than the $47,650 a quarter of Watch and Clock Repairers settle for.
The climb from $67,230 to $91,490 is $24,260; the drop to $47,650 is $19,580. A little more room above the midpoint than below it is the normal shape for Watch and Clock Repairers and for most paid work, and it is the reason the median is the honest summary rather than the average.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Watch and Clock Repairers is $32.32 an hour. The quarters sit at $22.90 and $43.98, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
This is payroll data: it comes from employers, about people they employ. Anyone doing the work of Watch and Clock Repairers for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $67,230 describes them.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Watch and Clock Repairers, the hourly figure is $67,230 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