Welder, Cutter & Solderer Salary Guide for Employers (SOC 51-4121)

Your Welder Just Countered — and You're Not Sure What the Market Actually Pays

You posted the role, screened six candidates, and made an offer to the one who could read a weld symbol and pass your shop's bend test. Then came the reply: "I was thinking more like $28 an hour." You offered $23. Now you're wondering whether that $5 gap is a negotiating tactic or whether your number was genuinely off.

It's a question that comes up every hiring cycle — and the answer isn't in your gut or in Indeed's salary estimator. It's in the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) data, updated every May across roughly 800 occupations, including the one that covers your hire: SOC 51-4121, Welders, Cutters, Solderers, and Brazers.

This guide gives you that data by percentile, walks you through what O*NET says about what welders actually do, and shows you how to convert those percentiles into a real offer range — so the next time a candidate counters, you'll know exactly where your number stands.

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What BLS Data Covers — and What It Doesn't

Before the numbers, one important framing note: BLS OEWS (bls.gov/oes) groups welders, cutters, solderers, and brazers into a single series under SOC 51-4121. That means the national median reflects everyone from a MIG welder on a fabrication line to a certified pipe welder on a refinery turnaround.

That grouping matters for you as an employer. A pipe welder with a 6G certification or a structural welder working under AWS D1.1 will command a premium over the midpoint — that's a real market dynamic, but it shows up in the percentile spread, not as a separate BLS row. When you're hiring a specialist, anchor on the 75th percentile or above and verify local conditions at bls.gov/oes.

State and metro-level medians for SOC 51-4121 are not included in this guide because they vary by geography and need to be pulled directly from BLS at the time you're making your offer. Go to bls.gov/oes, select the May 2024 release (or the most current release available), filter to SOC 51-4121, and choose your state or metro area. If the cell is suppressed — which can happen in smaller metros with fewer than ten estimated employees in the occupation — fall back to the state figure, then the national.

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The Welder Salary Market by Percentile (BLS, May 2024)

Here is the national wage distribution for SOC 51-4121 as of the BLS May 2024 OEWS release:

Percentile	Annual Wage
10th percentile	$38,130
Median (50th percentile)	$51,000
90th percentile	$75,850

What these percentiles mean for your offer:

A percentile tells you where a wage sits relative to everyone else working in that occupation nationally. The 10th percentile ($38,130) is the floor — nine out of ten welders earn more than this. The median ($51,000) is the true midpoint: half the workforce earns less, half earns more. The 90th percentile ($75,850) is where the top tenth of earners land — typically the most credentialed, most experienced, or most specialized workers.

For a straight-replacement hire — a journeyman welder with a few years of experience, no specialty certifications, in a market with average competition — the median is your anchor. For a pipe welder, a TIG welder on precision work, or anyone holding a current AWS CWI or 6G cert, the 75th percentile is the honest starting point.

The $37,720 spread between the 10th and 90th percentiles is wide — wider than most other construction trades. That spread reflects the real variation in certification level, process (MIG vs. TIG vs. FCAW vs. SMAW), material (carbon steel vs. stainless vs. aluminum), and industry (manufacturing vs. construction vs. energy). A welder salary guide that gives you a single number isn't giving you enough.

The BLS also reports 457,300 welding jobs nationally (2024) and projects +2% growth through 2034, with roughly 45,600 annual openings — most of them driven by retirements and turnover, not net new positions. That's a steady, competitive market, not a crisis — but it means every shop in your metro is working from the same candidate pool. Source: bls.gov/ooh/production/welders-cutters-solderers-and-brazers.htm

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What the O*NET Profile Says About What Welders Do

SOC 51-4121 has an ONET Job Zone of 3 — meaning most positions require medium preparation: typically one to two years of related work experience, on-the-job training, or vocational/technical training, often followed by a certification exam. (Job Zone is ONET's five-level scale from 1 = little preparation required to 5 = extensive preparation required; Zone 3 sits in the middle.)

O*NET identifies the core tasks for this occupation as:

• Operating manual or semi-automatic welding equipment to fuse metal segments (MIG, TIG, stick, flux-core)
• Reading blueprints, drawings, and specifications to determine joint configuration and welding process
• Inspecting completed welds visually and with measuring instruments to ensure conformance to specifications
• Operating cutting equipment — plasma, oxy-fuel, laser — to cut and shape metal
• Cleaning and preparing surfaces prior to welding, including grinding, chipping, and brushing

The key knowledge domains O*NET flags for this occupation include mechanical knowledge, production and processing, and mathematics. The ability to maintain steady hands, tolerate confined and awkward positions, and work in environments with high heat and noise is central to the work context profile.

For hiring purposes, that knowledge-and-ability profile matters in two ways: it shapes your screening criteria, and it shapes your comp conversation. A candidate who has cross-process experience (say, both MIG and TIG), who can read complex drawings independently, and who holds a current certification is demonstrably at the high end of this profile — and your offer should reflect that.

For a deeper look at pipefitting and the adjacent roles that often overlap with high-end welding work, see our pipefitter salary guide. For the structural side, the ironworker salary guide covers SOC 47-2221 and its own percentile spread.

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Building a Salary Band from the BLS Percentiles

A salary band converts a point-in-time wage figure into an offer range with a floor, a midpoint, and a ceiling. Here's how to build one using the welder median as the anchor — and how to use it at the offer table.

Worked example (for illustration — verify your market's figures at bls.gov/oes before using):

Start with the BLS May 2024 national median: $51,000.

Apply a spread buffer — a standard practice is ±15% to ±20% from the midpoint, depending on how wide you want the band. A 20% spread gives you:

• Band minimum: $51,000 × 0.80 = $40,800
• Midpoint (anchor): $51,000
• Band maximum: $51,000 × 1.20 = $61,200

What does that tell you at the offer table? A candidate with one to two years of experience and no specialty certification belongs near the minimum-to-midpoint range. A five-year welder with dual-process certification and a clean weld-test record belongs at or above the midpoint. The maximum is reserved for your most senior, most credentialed, cross-trained welders — the people you'd lose to a pipeline turnaround crew if your comp fell behind.

This is a formula, not a fact about the world — your local market may sit higher or lower than the national median. Pull your state or metro figure from bls.gov/oes and use that as the anchor instead. For a full walkthrough of how to build, document, and apply a salary band to any trade role, see our guide on how to build a salary band for trades.

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The Real Cost of Getting the Number Wrong

When you mis-price a welder offer — in either direction — the cost is real, even if it's hard to see on a single hire.

Offer too low and the candidate walks, or accepts and starts looking again within sixty days. According to SHRM benchmarks, replacing an employee can cost anywhere from 50% to 200% of annual salary — for a welder at the national median, that's a modeled range of $25,500 to $102,000 per turnover event (illustrative model based on SHRM data; verify for your situation). Recruiting, screening, onboarding, and lost productivity during the gap are the main drivers.

Offer too high relative to your existing team — especially if your current welders find out — and you've created an internal equity problem that costs you a different way: quiet resentment, requests for retroactive adjustments, or your best long-tenured welder walking out the door.

The answer isn't to split the difference. It's to know where the market actually sits before the first interview, so your number is defensible from the moment you say it.

If your shop runs industrial maintenance crews alongside your trade welders, the comp dynamics are closely related — our industrial maintenance wage benchmarking guide covers how to handle multi-trade comp structures in that context.

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How to Apply This Guide at Your Next Offer

Here's the fast version:

1. Pull the current BLS figure for your geography. Go to bls.gov/oes, find the most recent May release, filter to SOC 51-4121, and select your state or metro. If your metro cell is suppressed, use the state figure.
2. Classify the candidate's experience tier. Entry-level or unproven → near the 25th percentile. Journeyman with experience → median. Credentialed specialist (6G, AWS CWI, TIG on stainless or aluminum, pressure vessel experience) → 75th percentile or above.
3. Build a three-point band. Use the methodology above — or the salary band builder walkthrough — to set a min, midpoint, and max.
4. Check your internal equity. Where does your existing team sit relative to the new band? If you're about to hire above a current welder who's been with you three years, address that proactively.
5. Document your anchor. The next time a candidate counters, you want to be able to say "our range is built from the BLS May 2024 national median for SOC 51-4121, adjusted for our metro" — not "it's what we've always paid."

For a broader view across all the trades your shop hires, the skilled trades wage benchmarking guide and the trade wage data hub are good starting points.

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Get the Full Picture

If you want all of this in one place — welder pay, pipefitter pay, ironworker pay, and eight other specialty trade SOC codes — side by side and formatted for use at the offer table, the Skilled Trades Compensation Guide 2026 (PDF) has the full cross-trade breakdown with percentile tables and band-building worksheets for each occupation.

And if you want to pull BLS OEWS + O*NET data on demand — with a salary-band generator that does the percentile math for your specific metro and experience tier in seconds — SkilledMarkets does exactly that, at SMB pricing built for shops like yours. See the plans or start a 14-day free trial with no commitment required.

Your next welder offer doesn't have to be a guess.

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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.