Occupation / job
Woodworkers, All Other
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
Woodworkers, All Other pays $44,530 where the typical job pays $50,020 — $2.63 an hour apart. That is close enough to average that the interesting numbers on this page are the percentiles, not the median.
With 5,490 employed nationally, Woodworkers, All Other is a small occupation. Small occupations are quiet: few postings, slow turnover, and a real chance that the person you would replace is not going anywhere.
Woodworking suits people who want a finished object at the end of the day and can work to a tolerance in a material that moves with the weather.
How long it takes to become one of the 5,490 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
From $36,320 to $55,180 is $1,571 a month, or 1.5x bottom quarter to top. An ordinary spread like this is mostly years and geography; assume you enter near the bottom of it and that closing the gap takes a career rather than a move.
A quarter of Woodworkers, All Other earn under $36,320, which is $13,700 short of the $50,020 national midpoint. Assume you start there and check whether the arithmetic still works.
Avoid it if dust, noise and machine risk are not acceptable to you every day for the whole of a career.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 5,490 figure counts people already working as Woodworkers, All Other, 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
1.5x between $36,320 and $55,180 is the ordinary shape of an occupation where experience and region both matter and neither dominates. $44,530 is a fair expectation by mid-career, not on day one.
Put in money rather than ratios: $36,320 at the 25th percentile, $44,530 at the midpoint, $55,180 at the 75th. $18,860 separates the quarter of Woodworkers, All Other at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Between $36,320 and $55,180 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $44,530. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $10,650; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $18,860.
The climb from $44,530 to $55,180 is $10,650; the drop to $36,320 is $8,210. A little more room above the midpoint than below it is the normal shape for Woodworkers, All Other 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: $17.46 at the bottom quarter, $21.40 at the midpoint, $26.52 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 Woodworkers, All Other. The self-employed are excluded, so $44,530 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $44,530 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