Plumbers install and repair water, gas, and other piping in homes, businesses, and factories — including fixtures such as bathtubs and toilets.
Pipefitters install and maintain pipes that may carry chemicals, acids, and gases, mostly in manufacturing, commercial, and industrial settings.
Same craft, different systems and settings: this guide compares what each trade installs, where each works, how licensing differs, what the pay data shows, and whether you can switch between them.
Plumber vs pipefitter: the one-line answer
The pipe is the same; the system and the setting are not.
Plumbers work on the piping people use — water, gas, and other piping systems, plus the fixtures and appliances attached to them.
Pipefitters work on process piping: pipes that carry chemicals, acids, and gases through industrial facilities.
Pick your trade by picking the piping you want to be responsible for.
| Plumber | Pipefitter | |
|---|---|---|
| Installs (BLS scope) | Water, gas, and other piping systems; fixtures such as bathtubs and toilets; appliances such as dishwashers and water heaters | Pipes that may carry chemicals, acids, and gases |
| Works (BLS scope) | Homes, businesses, and factories | Mostly manufacturing, commercial, and industrial settings |
| Federal data | One combined occupation — 47-2152, Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters | |
That last row matters more than it looks.
O*NET merged the old Plumber code (47-2152.02) and the old Pipe Fitters and Steamfitters code (47-2152.01) into a single occupation, 47-2152.00, and the old codes are "no longer in use" — the combined occupation explicitly includes sprinkler fitters too.
Federally there is one occupation here, not two; the differences that matter are the ones in the rows above.
Each trade's deep dive lives in its own guide — our plumber career guide and pipefitter career guide.
What each one installs
Plumbers install and repair water, gas, and other piping systems in homes, businesses, and factories.
The BLS scope includes the fixtures attached to those systems — bathtubs and toilets are the named examples — and the appliances plumbers connect, such as dishwashers and water heaters.
It is the piping a building's occupants touch, drink from, and bathe in.
Pipefitters install and maintain pipes that may carry chemicals, acids, and gases — the piping that serves a process rather than an occupant.
The BLS description covers pipefitters and steamfitters together, with steamfitters specializing in systems for liquids or gases at high pressure.
The United Association describes steamfitters' work as fabricating, installing, maintaining, and repairing high-pressure systems that move steam, hot water, and other industrial fluids — chilled water and compressed air included — with welding, rigging, and hydrostatic and pneumatic testing in the mix.
The contents of the pipe tell you which trade you are looking at.
Potable water, gas, and the fixtures they feed are plumbing scope; chemical, acid, and high-pressure gas lines in a plant are pipefitter scope.
Between them sits the industrial end of plumbing — the industrial plumber label some employers use for plumbers who work in factory settings — which is exactly where the two trades' edges meet.
Where each works
The BLS settings split the same way.
Plumbers work in homes, businesses, and factories.
Pipefitters and steamfitters work mostly in manufacturing, commercial, and industrial settings — plants and facilities, where the piping serves production.
In the industry data, both trades land in the same employers.
Building equipment contractors — the specialty contractors that install building systems — employed 340,140 of the combined occupation's 465,840 wage-and-salary workers in May 2025, ahead of utility system construction at 14,960 and local government excluding schools and hospitals at 11,480.
A plumbing contractor and a mechanical contractor can be two sides of the same industry.
Geography follows construction, not trade.
The states with the most jobs in the combined occupation in May 2025 were California (47,660), Texas (44,090), Florida (29,260), New York (23,210), and Illinois (16,750), and the busiest metro areas were New York-Newark-Jersey City (21,040), 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).
Those counts cover plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters together — and both trades hire from this board: see open plumber jobs and pipefitter jobs.
Licensing differences
Plumbing has the denser licensing structure.
Where a statewide plumber licence exists, it commonly runs the classic ladder — apprentice or trainee, then journeyman, then master — though the rungs are not universal: some states license a journeyman level without a state master licence, and not every state licenses plumbers at the state level at all.
In several states, plumber licensing lives at the city or county level, or the state licenses plumbing contractors rather than individual workers.
Process piping is a different credential where states license it separately.
Mechanical licences that include process piping but not plumbing have been found in Michigan, Virginia, Oklahoma, and New Mexico (MM-4), while Minnesota licenses high-pressure and process piping workers separately as a statewide pipefitter licence.
The example shows how concrete the split gets: a journeyman pipefitter licence in Massachusetts requires 6,000 hours as a licensed apprentice pipefitter under a Massachusetts master pipefitter, plus 450 hours of approved instruction, then a state exam.
So plumber and pipefitter are two different licences in the states that license both — not interchangeable titles on one credential.
Which licence covers your work depends on the state you work in and, in many states, the city or county.
Licensing is state and local — confirm before you rely on it
Pay comparison: what the federal data shows
Start with the honest limit: there is no plumber-only or pipefitter-only federal wage.
Because BLS combines plumbers, pipefitters, steamfitters, and sprinkler fitters in one occupation (47-2152), any BLS plumber-vs-pipefitter pay comparison is impossible from federal data — the example titles in the combined code run from Plumber and Master Plumber to Pipe Fitter, Steamfitter, Sprinkler Fitter, and Gas Plumber.
Anyone quoting separate medians for the two trades is not quoting BLS.
What BLS does publish is the combined occupation, measured by the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey for May 2025, released May 15, 2026.
The median wage was $30.67 an hour, or $63,800 a year — half earned more, half less.
The mean was $34.70 an hour, or $72,170 a year.
The spread is wide: workers at the 75th percentile earned $40.92 an hour ($85,110 a year), and workers at the 90th percentile earned $52.13 an hour ($108,420 a year).
The occupation had 465,840 wage-and-salary jobs, and BLS projects 6.8 percent employment growth from 2025 to 2035 — above the 3.5 percent all-occupation average — with about 42,000 openings a year.
One defensible signal does exist, and it points to the pipefitter side of this page — sort of.
The highest-paying industries in the combined occupation are industrial ones: electric power generation, transmission and distribution ($115,310 median), petroleum and coal products manufacturing ($106,550), and pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing ($105,800) — small niches, not typical jobs.
BLS does not say which trade those workers belong to, so read that as a setting effect, not a pipefitter premium.
The survey also excludes overtime pay, shift differentials, and nonproduction bonuses, so workers who log overtime can out-earn the published figures.
For the state-by-state numbers, see the plumber salary page and the pipefitter salary page — both report the combined-occupation data behind the role you search.
No plumber-only or pipefitter-only wage exists
Can you switch or do both?
Federally, nothing separates the two — one occupation code covers both — so switching is a question of training, licensing, and union jurisdiction, not of changing industries.
The training model is already shared: BLS says most plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters learn the trade through a 4- or 5-year apprenticeship with about 2,000 hours of paid on-the-job training each year, plus technical instruction.
What transfers between the trades — credit for hours, classification, exam exemptions — is decided by apprenticeship sponsors, employers, and licensing boards; our research found no standard conversion rule, so ask the sponsor or board you would be dealing with.
Licensing is the layer to check first.
The plumber ladder and the process-piping licences described above are separate credentials in the states that license both, so a plumbing licence does not automatically cover a chemical or high-pressure process line — or the reverse.
The authority to tell you which side of the line a job falls on is your state licensing board, or your city and county where licensing is local.
In the union construction world, both trades sit inside the same international: the United Association lists plumbers, pipefitters, steamfitters, sprinkler fitters, pipeliners, welders, HVACR service technicians, and the metal trades among its trades, and says it represents approximately 409,000 members across North America.
Jurisdiction — which local covers which work — varies by local, so the practical move for someone who wants to work both sides of the line is to ask the local hall what it allows and what it requires.
This page is career information, not legal or licensing advice. Licensing requirements are set by state boards and local jurisdictions and change — confirm anything you rely on with your state licensing board or local building department.