Roofer Salary Guide for Employers (SOC 47-2181)

A roofing GC in the Southwest offers a foreman a rate he thinks is competitive. The foreman turns it down flat — he just interviewed two towns over and heard something higher. The GC pulls up bls.gov, types in "roofer wages," and lands on a national figure that doesn't match either number now bouncing around in his head. He clicks through to a state page, then a metro page, and ends up with three different numbers and no clear read on which one actually describes the job he's trying to fill.

This happens on roofing crews more than almost any other trade, because roofing work is seasonal, regional, and physically demanding in ways that show up directly in the wage data. Crews doing storm and hail restoration in exposure-prone markets, steep-slope specialists, and flat low-slope commercial crews in a mild climate are not drawing from the same labor pool, and a single headline number can't price any of them correctly.

This guide walks through exactly how the federal wage data behind SOC 47-2181 — Roofers — is built, what the percentile spread actually tells you, and how to turn it into a band you can defend before your next hire walks.

How BLS OEWS Builds the Wage Data Behind SOC 47-2181

Every occupational wage figure a contractor pulls from the government — including roofer pay — comes from one program: the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey. It's an employer payroll survey, not a crowd-sourced estimate: BLS samples roughly 1.1 million establishments across six semiannual survey panels spanning three years, representing about 55% of national employment, according to the OEWS Technical Note published with the May 2025 release.

The program covers over 800 occupations — roofers (SOC 47-2181) among them — down to the national, state, and metropolitan/nonmetropolitan area level. The current reference release is May 2025 data, released May 15, 2026; that release was delayed by the federal government shutdown running October 1 through November 12, 2025, but BLS reports the response rate stayed within its normal historical range and no methodology changes were required.

That detail matters for a roofer salary guide for employers because it tells you where to look for the real number: the current OEWS release for SOC 47-2181, not a figure carried over from a prior vintage without checking the date on it. Wage data ages. A roofer median wage pulled from a 2022 article and presented as current is, by definition, out of date — treat any number you see without a release date attached as suspect, and confirm the vintage before you build an offer around it.

What the Five Wage Percentiles Actually Mean

OEWS doesn't publish one number per occupation — it publishes five.

The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program reports wages at the 10th, 25th, 50th (median), 75th, and 90th percentiles for every occupation it covers, with the annual figure calculated as the hourly mean wage × 2,080 hours — the same methodology behind every roofer wage figure you'll ever see cited.

That spread is the whole point. The 10th percentile roughly describes an entry-level helper; the 50th (median) describes the typical experienced worker; the 90th describes a lead, foreman, or specialist with scarce skills. A single "average" wage collapses that range into a number nobody on your crew is actually earning. If you're setting pay for a roofing foreman, you want to know where the 75th and 90th percentiles sit for SOC 47-2181 in your metro — not the blended average across every roofer in the country, helpers included.

This is also where most of the confusion in the opening scenario comes from: the GC and his foreman were each anchored to a different percentile in their heads, neither one labeled as such.

Why Metro-Level Data Changes the Math for Roofers

OEWS breaks its data out across roughly 530 metro and nonmetro areas, specifically so a national median isn't the only option available to you. For a trade like roofing, that granularity isn't optional — it's the difference between a usable number and a misleading one.

Roofing wages respond to local conditions that a national figure can't capture: storm and hail-restoration demand cycles, steep-slope versus low-slope specialization, union density in a given metro, and how tight the local labor market is for crews willing to work in extreme heat or on exposed structures. None of that shows up in a single countrywide average. It does show up — at least directionally — once you drill into state and metro-level OEWS tables for SOC 47-2181.

We're not going to hand you a specific state or metro dollar figure here and ask you to trust it's current. Wage tables move every release, and a number presented as fact without its vintage attached is worse than no number at all. The honest move is to pull the live SOC 47-2181 table for your metro directly from bls.gov/oes, or get it already joined to the rest of the occupational context through a Single-Trade Deep Wage Report.

A Worked Example: Building a Roofer Salary Band

Here's how the math works once you have real percentile numbers in hand — using round, hypothetical figures purely to demonstrate the method, not actual data for any state or metro.

Say your live pull for SOC 47-2181 in your metro shows a 25th percentile of $42,000, a median of $50,000, and a 75th percentile of $58,000. You've decided this foreman role should be anchored at the 75th percentile, because the position requires lead-level experience and the local market is tight. From there:

• Minimum: anchor minus a spread buffer — say 10% below $58,000, landing around $52,200.
• Midpoint: the anchor itself, $58,000.
• Maximum: anchor plus the same buffer, roughly $63,800.

That's the full mechanic: pick a percentile anchor that matches the role's seniority and your local labor tightness, then apply a spread buffer above and below it to get a defensible min/midpoint/max. The buffer size is a judgment call based on how much room you want for negotiation and tenure growth — walked through in more detail in how to build a salary band for trades and in which percentile should you pay.

The Labor Market You're Hiring Into

Roofing doesn't sit in a labor-market vacuum — it's drawing from the same pool as the rest of construction, and that pool is tight. The construction quits rate ran 1.8% in both 2024 and 2025, down from 2.4% in 2021–2022, according to BLS JOLTS data — a sign workers are holding onto jobs rather than job-hopping, which cuts both ways: good for retention once you've got a crew, harder to recruit against once a competitor has one.

Demand for construction labor broadly remains high: the Associated Builders and Contractors estimated the industry needed roughly 439,000 net new workers in 2025, with Construction Dive reporting ABC's updated projections of about 349,000 for 2026 and roughly 456,000 for 2027. The National Association of Home Builders' Home Builders Institute put the broader annual need even higher, at approximately 723,000 construction workers per year. Construction average hourly earnings rose 4.4% over the trailing twelve months as of January 2025, per ABC's analysis of BLS data — a sign that wage pressure in the trades isn't easing.

None of those figures are roofer-specific, and we're not presenting them as such — they describe the construction labor market roofers compete in for workers. But they explain why a stale or underpriced offer doesn't just get declined quietly. SHRM's 2022 research put the average cost per hire at roughly $4,700 across industries, and Gallup estimates replacing an employee costs between 0.5× and 2× their annual salary, conservatively, with voluntary turnover costing U.S. businesses roughly $1 trillion a year and more than half of those exits considered preventable. A mispriced roofer offer is one of the more preventable ones. More on that math in the cost of a bad skilled trades hire.

Using This Roofer Salary Guide for Employers to Price Your Next Offer

The short version of this roofer salary guide for employers: don't price a roofing role off a single national average, don't trust a number with no release date attached, and don't guess at which percentile you're actually trying to hit. Pull the current SOC 47-2181 table for your metro directly from bls.gov/oes, decide which percentile matches the role's seniority and your local market tightness, and apply a spread buffer to get a min/midpoint/max band you can actually defend in an offer conversation.

If you'd rather not spend an afternoon reconciling national, state, and metro OEWS tables by hand every time you need to fill a roofing role, that's the exact gap SkilledMarkets closes — it joins BLS OEWS percentile data with O*NET occupational detail by SOC code and generates an offer-ready band from your chosen anchor and buffer in minutes rather than a Friday afternoon. For a single trade like roofing, the Single-Trade Deep Wage Report packages exactly this, and the trade offer check calculator lets you stress-test a draft offer against the current percentile spread before you send it. For the broader methodology across every trade SkilledMarkets covers, start with the skilled trades wage benchmarking guide.