Plumbers can make six figures — but the median sits well below it.
Plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters earned a median of $63,800 a year in May 2025 (BLS OEWS), and somewhere between 10% and 25% of the combined trade earned $100,000 or more in measured pay.
How much you can make as a plumber comes down to four paths: the master license and union scale, service and drain commission, specialty industries, and business ownership.
Short answer: how much can you make as a plumber?
Yes — six figures is reachable, but it is not the middle.
BLS's OEWS program counted 465,840 wage-and-salary plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters (SOC 47-2152) in May 2025, data released May 15, 2026.
The median — half earn more, half earn less — was $63,800 a year ($30.67 an hour); the mean was $34.70 an hour ($72,170).
Those are different statistics, so this page picks one — the median — and stays with it for every comparison below.
The six-figure line sits between the 75th and 90th percentiles: $85,110 and $108,420 a year.
BLS does not publish the exact share above $100,000 — only that somewhere between 10% and 25% of the combined trade earned $100,000+ in OEWS-measured pay.
Read those numbers for what they measure.
OEWS counts employees only: self-employed owners and partners in unincorporated firms are excluded.
Its annual figures assume a 2,080-hour year.
Its wages include base pay, commissions, production bonuses, incentive pay and tips — and exclude overtime pay, shift differentials, non-production bonuses such as sign-on bonuses, and benefits.
A plumber who runs heavy call-out overtime can therefore earn more than the published figures show, by an amount the data cannot say.
So the honest answer has two layers: a $63,800 middle, and a top decile that starts at $108,420 for employees — with the owner's earnings unmeasured.
The four paths below are how plumbers move up or out of that table.
The full state-by-state wage tables are on our plumber salary page.
Path 1: master license and union scale
The license ladder is the trade's route up.
Per BLS, most plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters learn the trade through a 4- or 5-year apprenticeship, with typically 2,000 hours of paid on-the-job training plus technical instruction each year; unions, trade associations and businesses sponsor the programs.
Above the apprenticeship sit the journeyman and master tiers — but BLS prices the entire ladder as one combined occupation — plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters — and we found no separate wage for its journeyman or master tiers, so the published figures cannot separate what the master license alone adds.
Its pay value is structural: the ladder decides what work you can sell.
What each tier is called, permits, and requires is defined by whoever issues the license — a state board, or a city or county where licensing is local.
The tier-by-tier detail is our master plumber guide's subject.
Then geography, because scale is local.
The top-paying metros for the trade, by annual median wage in May 2025, all clear $100,000: San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA at $107,560; Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN at $103,380; Bellingham, WA at $102,750; Minneapolis-St.
Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI at $101,630; and Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA at $101,010.
The biggest job markets are a different list: New York-Newark-Jersey City (21,040 jobs), Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim (15,690), Chicago-Naperville-Elgin (12,750), Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington (11,980) and Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands (10,980).
Only Chicago appears on both.
The volume sits elsewhere too: the most jobs are in California (47,660), Texas (44,090), Florida (29,260), New York (23,210) and Illinois (16,750).
So the six-figure path often means going where the pay already is, not staying where the jobs are thickest.
Union scale — how agreements set local journeyman rates, what apprentices are paid against them, and what the total package beyond the hourly wage adds — is our union plumber pay guide's subject.
The metro medians above are the local numbers any six-figure path has to beat.
For what each rung of the ladder earns, level by level, see our plumber pay scale breakdown.
License tiers are set by your board — or your city
Path 2: service and drain commission
Commission is an employer practice — each company writes its own pay plan — and our research found no verified national commission rate for service or drain work, so this section can explain only how the federal data treats commission, not what a typical plan pays.
On the wage side, we found no separate federal line for service plumbers or drain technicians; the combined 47-2152 occupation is the figure BLS publishes, and it is the one this page cites.
What the data does say is how commission is measured.
OEWS wages include commissions, production bonuses, incentive pay and tips — so commissioned technicians are inside the trade's published figures.
But OEWS excludes overtime pay, shift differentials, non-production bonuses such as sign-on bonuses, and benefits.
The consequence: a commissioned service tech who runs heavy call-out overtime can earn more than the published percentiles show, by an amount the data cannot say.
The table measures the pay plan; it does not measure the hours stacked on top of it.
For the work itself — what service calls and drain jobs involve, and how the roles differ — see our service plumber and drain technician guides.
Path 3: specialties
BLS publishes the trade as one combined occupation — plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters (SOC 47-2152) — and the cuts that table carries run by industry, employer and geography; we found no specialty wage line in it, with residential and commercial work and service and new-construction work all inside the one occupation.
Where the data does show a premium is by industry.
The highest-paying industries for plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters in May 2025, by annual median: electric power generation, transmission and distribution at $115,310; petroleum and coal products manufacturing at $106,550; pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing at $105,800.
All three are small niches, not typical jobs.
The employer picture is more ordinary.
Most of the trade works for building equipment contractors — 340,140 jobs — against 14,960 in utility system construction and 11,480 in local government outside schools and hospitals.
The industry medians: government employers excluding education and hospitals $71,660; manufacturing $65,770; heavy and civil engineering construction $63,270; and plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning contractors $63,010.
Read together: employer type moves the median within a $63,010 to $71,660 band; of the industry cuts cited on this page, only the three industrial niches clear $100,000 at the median.
The full ranking — every industry cut, the adjacent estimator and inspector tables, and what each figure measures — is on our highest-paying plumbing jobs page.
This page stays on the question it owns: which of those numbers you can reach, and how.
Path 4: ownership
Ownership is the one path outside every table on this page.
OEWS counts employees; self-employed owners and partners in unincorporated firms are excluded entirely — the wage table does not measure what a plumbing business owner earns.
We will not manufacture a figure — the data we checked has no honest national "plumbing business owner income" number.
The closest measured context is the contractor industry's employee payroll.
Within plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning contractors (NAICS 238220), the trade counted 330,570 plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters at a $63,010 median, with a 90th percentile of $107,780 — employees only, owners not counted.
Even the contractor industry's employee top decile starts just past the six-figure line; any owner's upside beyond wages is a margin the wage table does not count.
Demand is part of the picture: BLS's Employment Projections program has the trade growing 6.8% from 2025 to 2035, from 510.6k to 545.2k jobs — a count that includes the self-employed — with about 42,000 openings a year, against a 3.5% all-occupation average.
What ownership actually requires — the contractor license, startup costs, pricing, and what first-three-years income the data does and does not show — is our starting your own plumbing business guide's subject.
Can a plumber become a millionaire?
Honest answer first: nothing on this page can say, because every figure here measures one year's income, not accumulated wealth.
None of the wage tables cited here tracks net worth, and our research found no verified figure for how many plumbers become millionaires — so treat any such percentage as unsourced unless it names where its number came from.
What the data does support is the shape of the path.
As an employee, the measured top decile starts at $108,420 a year, and the $63,800 median is a solid income to hold for a career.
The two paths whose upside the tables cannot see are commission service work — measured only up to the exclusions — and ownership, which the wage data never counts at all.
That is also where the honest "how to become a rich plumber" answer lands: the trade reliably prices a comfortable middle, between 10% and 25% of the combined trade already clear six figures in measured pay, and the tables stop measuring at the ownership line, the one place this page cannot follow with numbers.
Beyond that line the evidence is private business outcomes, which the wage data on this page does not reach — so this page will not put a number on them.
Career information, not legal or financial advice. Wage figures are BLS OEWS May 2025 (released May 15, 2026) and BLS Employment Projections 2025–35 as cited above; license tiers and contractor qualification are set by your state licensing board — or your city or county where licensing is local. Confirm the rules that apply to you with whoever issues them.