Union Pipefitter and Steamfitter Pay: Scale, Per Diem and Benefits

Scale is the hourly rate a collective bargaining agreement sets for journeyman pipefitter work.

Each local union negotiates its own agreement, and each agreement carries its own wage schedule — our research found no national UA rate sheet, and any scale figure quoted online is one local's rate at one time.

That is why this page explains the mechanics and points you to the document that carries your number, instead of printing a rate we cannot verify.

The law shapes the structure, not the amounts.

Federal rules for registered apprenticeship programs — 29 CFR 29.5(b)(5) — require a progressively increasing schedule of wages, with an entry wage not below the federal minimum wage where applicable, or higher if another law or a collective bargaining agreement requires.

No federal rule fixes apprentice pay at a percentage of the journeyman rate: the familiar percentage steps come from each registered program standard or collective bargaining agreement.

The ladder runs toward scale because apprentices earn less than fully trained plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters, and their pay increases as they learn to do more — in a trade where BLS says most learn the craft through a 4- or 5-year apprenticeship.

On Davis-Bacon construction — federally funded prevailing-wage work — an apprentice may be paid below the posted rate only if individually registered in a Department of Labor- or state-registered apprenticeship program, at the percentages that program sets.

An apprentice working above the allowed apprentice-to-journeyworker ratio, or one who is not registered, must be paid the full wage-determination rate for the work performed.

As for who is in the union at all: BLS's union tables cover broad occupation groups, not pipefitters specifically.

In 2025, 16.4% of employed wage-and-salary workers in construction and extraction occupations — the group that contains the pipe trades — were union members, and 17.4% were represented by a union.

The construction industry as a whole ran lower, at 11.1% members and 12.0% represented, against 10.0% union membership across all U.S. wage and salary workers.

(The 2025 union averages cover 11 months; BLS did not collect October 2025.)

Any claim that steamfitters out-earn pipefitters — or the reverse — cannot come from federal wage data.

BLS publishes one combined occupation, 47-2152 Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters, whose example titles include Pipe Fitter, Steamfitter, Sprinkler Fitter and Gas Plumber, and there is no separate BLS wage or outlook for plumbers only, pipefitters only or sprinkler fitters only.

The May 2025 median of $63,800 a year ($30.67 an hour) is one number for every craft in the group, union and non-union combined.

Where a steamfitter local's scale genuinely differs from a pipefitter local's, the difference lives in the two agreements — set local by local, and exactly the figures our research could not verify, because each local publishes only its own.

Whether a given local covers pipefitting, steamfitting or both under one roof is a jurisdiction question with no national answer; ask the local.

The union-side mechanics — the hall, dispatch and travel cards — are covered in our pipefitters union guide, and the steamfitter craft itself has its own steamfitter career guide.

What the combined data does give you is the pipe trades' overall spread: in May 2025 the 75th percentile was $40.92 an hour ($85,110 a year) and the 90th percentile $52.13 ($108,420) — so somewhere between 10% and 25% of the group earned $100,000 or more in base pay as BLS measures it, which excludes overtime.

BLS does not publish the exact share.

The hours are where a scale year pulls ahead of the federal medians.

BLS annual wages assume a full-time, year-round schedule of 2,080 hours, and OEWS pay excludes overtime, shift differentials and non-production bonuses such as sign-on and holiday bonuses.

The arithmetic is blunt: a fitter whose weeks run past 40 hours is earning money the federal figures never count, and BLS itself notes that real annual earnings of workers who put in overtime can exceed the published numbers — by an amount nobody measures.

BLS describes most plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters as working full time, including nights and weekends.

What it does not publish is an overtime picture for pipefitters specifically: the shutdown and turnaround assignments the trade talks about have no federal wage line of their own, and our research did not verify their lengths, rotations or premium terms.

Those terms ride on the agreement for each job — which is how two fitters on the same scale can file very different W-2s in the same year.

Where the industrial money does show up in the data is by industry.

May 2025 medians for the combined group ran $71,660 in government (excluding education and hospitals), $65,770 in manufacturing, $63,270 in heavy and civil engineering construction, and $63,010 at plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractors.

None of those medians is union-specific — BLS does not split its tables that way — but they mark the segments of the trade that pay above the contractor baseline.

The full state and metro tables live on our pipefitter salary page.

Per diem is the flat daily amount that shows up on travel-job postings, on top of the hourly scale, when a call takes a fitter out of the home area.

There is no national per-diem figure we can responsibly print: our research verified none, and the amount — whether a given call carries one at all — is set by the agreement and the contractor on that call.

Any per-diem number you see in a forum is one traveler's deal in one local at one time.

Treat it as a contract question, and ask it before you take the road: what the per diem runs on this call, which days it covers, and what happens in a layoff week.

Get the answers in writing with the rest of the call terms.

The travel machinery around those jobs — travel cards, the out-of-work list, where a visitor stands in another local's territory — is its own system, also set local by local rather than by any national rule our research could confirm; the union guide above covers it.

The money point for this page: away from home, your working rate is the stack of scale, per diem and hours, and every layer of that stack belongs in writing.

Scale is the cash-wage layer.

The package around it is negotiated in the same agreements, and it is the layer BLS pay statistics never see: OEWS wages exclude benefits, and the weekly-earnings comparison earlier in this page counts earnings only.

Neither the $63,800 median nor the $1,561-versus-$1,004 gap says anything about which side carries the stronger health or retirement provisions — so a union-versus-non-union decision made on wage numbers alone is made on partial data.

What the package contains is a per-local question, and our research verified no specific UA plan details — the documents are the only source that matters: the current agreement's wage pages and the plan documents behind them.

There is one public window into how rate-and-fringe packages are written down: the Davis-Bacon wage determinations for federal work, published county by county on SAM.gov, list a journeyman hourly rate and a fringe amount side by side.

Read both lines when you compare offers.

How UA benefit plans actually work — and what to ask a hall about pension and health coverage — is covered in our pipefitters union guide.

Career and pay information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Scale, per diem and benefit provisions are set by each local's own agreements and plan documents — confirm the current numbers with the local union and, for benefits, the plan administrator.