Sheet Metal Worker Salary Guide for Employers (SOC 47-2211)

The counter you didn't see coming

Your journeyman sheet metal mechanic just called — the candidate you spent six weeks recruiting countered your offer by $6,000. He's got a second interview Friday and he already knows what two other shops are paying. You made your number by gut feel, maybe by what the last hire cost three years ago. Now you're scrambling to figure out whether to hold, meet him, or let him walk.

That scramble is exactly what this sheet metal worker salary guide is built to prevent. By the time you finish reading, you'll know what BLS OEWS data says the market pays for SOC 47-2211 workers at every experience level, how to read those percentiles as an offer framework, and how to pull a defensible salary band before the next candidate sits across from you.

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Who counts as a sheet metal worker (SOC 47-2211)?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks sheet metal workers under SOC code 47-2211 — that's the unique occupation identifier that connects a job title to a wage dataset. If you're not sure which SOC code covers a role you're hiring, a quick lookup in O*NET OnLine will map the job title to the right code before you pull a single number.

SOC 47-2211 covers workers who fabricate, assemble, install, and repair sheet metal products and equipment. In practice, that means the people laying HVAC ductwork on a commercial build, cutting and bending custom flashing on a roofing crew, fabricating custom enclosures in a manufacturing plant, or running exhaust systems in an industrial kitchen. The role is heavily represented in HVAC contracting — which is why the HVAC technician salary guide and this one often land in the same search — but sheet metal work extends well beyond mechanical systems into architectural, roofing, and industrial applications.

One thing worth noting: because sheet metal workers appear in both the construction and manufacturing sectors, the wage spread is real. A fabrication-shop worker and a commercial HVAC installer may carry the same SOC code but sit in quite different pay environments depending on your region and the union density in your market. The national figures below are the anchor — local reality is the adjustment.

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What the market pays: national sheet metal worker salary by percentile

The authoritative source for employer wage benchmarking is the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey — a sample of roughly 1.1 million establishments that produces annual employment and wage estimates across 800+ occupations. Every wage figure here comes from that dataset.

SOC 47-2211 — Sheet Metal Workers — National (BLS, May 2024):

Benchmark	Annual wage
Median (50th percentile)	$60,850/yr
Hourly equivalent (median)	$29.26/hr
Total employment	127,000

The median is the midpoint of the distribution: half of all sheet metal workers nationally earn less, half earn more. As an employer, it tells you what "market" looks like for a journeyman-level hire before you adjust for experience, geography, or the competitive heat in your local labor pool.

What percentiles mean for your offer. A percentile is a position in the distribution of all workers in the occupation. If a candidate is at the 75th percentile of experience and skill — meaning they outperform roughly 3 out of 4 sheet metal workers — pricing them at the median will feel low to both of you. Percentile anchoring turns a conversation about "what's fair" into "where does this person sit in the distribution, and what does that position pay nationally?"

The BLS OEWS table for SOC 47-2211 publishes the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentile wage points. The full percentile breakdown is available at bls.gov/oes — pull that table now, because the spread between the 10th and 90th percentile in this trade is wide enough that it will immediately reframe how you've been making offers.

For the full picture of how to translate those percentile figures into a structured min/midpoint/max offer framework, the salary band guide for trades walks through the methodology step by step.

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Where local rates diverge from the national figure

The national median of $60,850 is your baseline — but sheet metal worker wages vary meaningfully by state and metro. Coastal metros with strong union density (think the Northeast, Pacific Coast) tend to sit well above the national figure. Sun Belt markets are more varied, and rural or lightly industrialized regions sometimes fall below the median, though suppression (BLS doesn't publish an estimate when the sample is too small) can mean some metro cells are simply unavailable.

The honest answer: the verified data in this guide covers the national number. For your specific state or metro, go directly to bls.gov/oes, select SOC 47-2211, and pull the May 2024 (or the most recently released) state or MSA — Metropolitan Statistical Area — table. An MSA is simply the BLS's geographic unit for a major city and its surrounding labor market; it's the geography that most closely matches where your workers actually live and compete for jobs.

If your metro's cell is suppressed (BLS publishes a flag rather than a number when the estimate is based on too few observations), use the state figure. If the state figure is also unavailable, fall back to the national median and note it explicitly in your comp documentation. That's the right fallback — not an estimate, not a number from an aggregator site, not what you remember paying two years ago.

For a broader look at how to source and apply geographic wage data across multiple trades simultaneously, the trade wage data hub is a good starting point.

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The O*NET profile: what sheet metal work actually demands

Wage data tells you what the market pays. The O*NET occupational profile for SOC 47-2211 tells you why the market pays what it pays — and it's useful context when you're writing a job description, evaluating a candidate's background, or explaining an offer to someone who thinks sheet metal is a low-skill trade.

Key O*NET profile highlights for sheet metal workers:

• Job Zone 3 — "medium preparation needed." Job Zone is O*NET's scale from 1 (little or no preparation) to 5 (extensive preparation). Zone 3 typically means one to two years of post-secondary training or a multi-year apprenticeship, which for sheet metal workers often runs three to five years in a Registered Apprenticeship Program.
• Core knowledge areas: Building and construction, mechanical principles, mathematics, design, and engineering and technology.
• Key skills: Metal fabrication, blueprint reading, precision measurement, operation of shears, brakes, and forming equipment, and in HVAC applications, system layout and load calculation.
• Physical demands: The role involves sustained standing, frequent lifting, work at heights, and exposure to temperature extremes and noise — context that matters when you're calibrating total compensation relative to an office-based benchmark.

The depth of the apprenticeship pathway is worth underscoring. Sheet metal workers who come through a full JTAC- or SMWIA-affiliated apprenticeship program arrive with structured, assessed training — which is reflected in where they sit in the wage distribution. An applicant who completed a formal apprenticeship and an applicant who picked up sheet metal skills on the job may both call themselves sheet metal mechanics; the O*NET profile and a targeted skills conversation help you tell them apart before you anchor an offer.

For roles that overlap with mechanical systems, the HVAC technician salary guide covers the adjacent SOC 49-9021 wage data — worth reading if you hire for both disciplines. For a look at the structural steel side of the fabrication world, the ironworker salary guide covers SOC 47-2221.

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Building a salary band from the national median: a worked example

A salary band is the structured pay range — minimum, midpoint, and maximum — that turns a single benchmark number into an offer framework. Here's how to build one from the BLS median for a journeyman-level sheet metal worker, as an illustration of the method (not a prescription for your specific market):

Anchor: May 2024 national median for SOC 47-2211 = $60,850/yr

Spread buffer: A common approach for skilled trades is a ±15% to ±20% spread around the midpoint. Using ±18% as the example:

• Band minimum: $60,850 × (1 − 0.18) = ~$49,900
• Band midpoint: $60,850 (the anchor)
• Band maximum: $60,850 × (1 + 0.18) = ~$71,800

In practice, your midpoint might be the 50th percentile (as here) or the 75th if you're competing in a tight market and want to consistently win experienced hires. You'd adjust the minimum to reflect entry-level or early-career sheet metal workers and the maximum to reflect top-of-range journeymen or foremen. For the full step-by-step methodology, see how to build a salary band for trades.

This example uses a national anchor. If your local OEWS figure differs from the national median — and in many metros it will — substitute your state or MSA median as the anchor and rebuild from there.

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The cost of getting it wrong

The construction industry needed an estimated 439,000 net new workers in 2025 (Associated Builders and Contractors), and approximately 1 in 5 construction workers is already over age 55 (ABC), meaning the replacement pressure is structural, not cyclical. Sheet metal — at 127,000 total workers nationally and only +2% projected growth through 2034 (BLS) — is a trade where the supply side isn't expanding fast enough to soften the competition for experienced workers.

When you misprice an offer, you don't just lose that candidate. SHRM research puts replacing an employee at 50%–200% of annual salary — presented here as an illustrative model based on published SHRM benchmarks, not a measured outcome specific to sheet metal. At the $60,850 median, that's a modeled replacement cost range of roughly $30,000 to $120,000. Even the low end of that range covers a lot of salary-benchmarking research.

The skilled trades wage benchmarking guide goes deeper on how to build a repeatable wage-research process so you're not reconstructing this analysis from scratch every time a role opens.

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Getting the number faster

If pulling SOC-code tables from bls.gov, translating percentiles, and building a band in a spreadsheet sounds like an afternoon you don't have, the Skilled Trades Compensation Guide 2026 (PDF) is a ready-to-use reference that packages BLS OEWS wage data across the major trade SOC codes — including 47-2211 — with a formatted band framework built in. It's a practical fallback if you need the answer today.

If you're making trade offers regularly and want to run this process in real time for any trade, any geography, see the SkilledMarkets pricing page for a look at the platform that does the SOC lookup, the percentile pull, and the band generation in a single workflow — starting at $199/mo, with a 14-day free trial.

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This article includes information from O*NET OnLine, developed by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration. O*NET is a registered trademark of the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration.