How to Become a Plumbing Instructor (Trade School or Apprenticeship)

A plumbing instructor teaches the trade to people preparing to enter it: the classroom-and-lab side of the work a plumber career guide describes — the work you have been doing on trucks, in trenches and inside mechanical rooms.

Instructing swaps running calls for teaching the skills behind them.

What the job asks of you is the trade you already hold — explained, demonstrated and corrected — in a classroom and lab instead of installed in the field.

In the federal data, this work is measured, broadly, as one occupation: career/technical education teachers, postsecondary (SOC 25-1194) — 114,110 wage-and-salary jobs nationally in May 2025, self-employed excluded.

The category is all postsecondary CTE teachers, in every trade and technical subject it covers, not only plumbing — so read every number on this page as a category benchmark, not a plumbing-instructor quote.

What the data does not carry is a plumbing-specific job description.

Each employer defines the seat: which courses you would teach, how the lab time splits from lecture time, and whether the schedule follows an academic year.

Those details are the interview questions this page keeps returning to, because they are the ones our sources cannot answer for you.

BLS's list of the industries employing the most career/technical education teachers, postsecondary is topped by three kinds of school: technical and trade schools (45,860 jobs in May 2025), junior colleges (42,440) and colleges, universities, and professional schools (13,810).

Those are the employers at the top of the category — and the first places to point a search for plumbing teaching jobs.

The states with the most of these teaching jobs in May 2025 were Texas (12,620), California (11,040), Florida (7,600), North Carolina (6,510) and New York (5,250).

The metro areas with the most were New York-Newark-Jersey City (4,820), Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim (3,670), Chicago-Naperville-Elgin (3,160), Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington (3,110) and Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach (2,490).

Every count is the whole CTE-teacher category, so treat the lists as a map of where the work concentrates, not a count of plumbing instructor openings.

Union apprenticeship classrooms are another setting the industry list does not rank: BLS describes plumbing apprenticeship programs as sponsored by unions, trade associations and businesses, combining paid on-the-job training with technical instruction each year — and that technical instruction is the classroom side.

Our sources do not say how those programs staff their rooms.

If the union route is the one you want, ask the program directly — a training director can tell you how its instructors are hired and paid.

Here is the honest scope note: our research did not confirm any state's teaching-credential rules, so this page carries pay and employment data only and will not guess the rules — they may differ by state and by school.

What we can do is tell you where the answer lives.

Ask each school what it requires of plumbing instructors, and ask which state authority, if any, sets rules for career and technical education instructors where the school operates — between those answers, you have your checklist.

What carries over from the field is the record you build now: the licence you hold, the certifications you have earned, the systems you have worked and the years behind them.

Whatever a school asks for, expect to document it.

Keep those records current while you are still turning wrenches — if a school asks for a working interview or a demo session, that record is what you would draw on.

One distinction sharpens the search: for each requirement you hear about, ask whether it is the school's own rule or the state's, and verify it with whoever owns it.

A credential that satisfies one employer may not be the one the next asks about — check each separately.

The benchmark: career/technical education teachers, postsecondary (SOC 25-1194) had a national median wage of $30.68 an hour — $63,820 a year — in May 2025, and a mean (average) of $34.64 an hour, $72,060 a year.

The median is the midpoint — half earn more, half earn less; the mean is the average.

BLS released both figures on May 15, 2026.

Hourly and annual wages by percentile, SOC 25-1194, May 2025:

The field comparison comes from the same survey and the same release: plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters (SOC 47-2152) had a national median of $30.67 an hour — $63,800 a year — in May 2025.

Note what that SOC is: BLS groups plumbers with pipefitters and steamfitters, and OEWS publishes only the combined 47-2152 category, not a plumber-only wage.

These are two different occupations measured side by side, not a before-and-after study of plumbers who moved into classrooms; read them as category benchmarks, not a pay gap.

The field's full percentile breakdown lives on the plumber salary page.

Both figures are base-pay measures as BLS collects them: OEWS includes commissions and production bonuses but excludes overtime pay, shift differentials and nonproduction bonuses — so for plumbers whose real income leans on overtime, annual earnings can run above the OEWS numbers.

The field schedule is part of the trade-off: BLS describes most plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters as working full time, including nights and weekends, and notes plumbers are often on call for emergencies.

Our sources carry no BLS schedule description for the teaching side; ask each school how the contract is built (academic year vs twelve months), because that shapes both the schedule and the pay.

Pay varies by state, and the statistic you rank by changes the list.

By annual median wage, the top states in May 2025 were Wisconsin ($82,620), South Carolina ($79,610), Massachusetts ($78,780), Washington ($77,530) and Alaska ($77,310).

Ranked by annual mean wage instead: California ($90,340), Wisconsin ($88,930), Alaska ($83,650), Washington ($83,500) and Massachusetts ($82,620).

The two rankings disagree, so name the statistic whenever you quote a state list.

Metro-level lists deserve the same caution.

BLS's highest-paying areas for the occupation by annual median wage in May 2025 were Chico, California ($162,300); the North Valley-Northern Mountains Region of California nonmetropolitan area ($115,540); the Upper Peninsula of Michigan nonmetropolitan area ($109,520); Ann Arbor, Michigan ($108,400); and El Centro, California ($106,620) — a different list from the biggest metros, and one to treat as a signal to check locally, not a destination.

Where BLS sees this occupation earning more, it is in niches: the highest-paying industries for career/technical education teachers, postsecondary in May 2025 were business, professional, labor, political, and similar organizations ($92,970 annual median), employment services ($89,860) and colleges, universities, and professional schools ($69,770).

These are small niches, not typical jobs — useful as a ceiling, not an expectation.

The trade-off behind the numbers is growth.

BLS projects employment of career/technical education teachers, postsecondary to change −0.3% from 2025 to 2035 — 123.1k to 122.7k jobs, a count that includes the self-employed, unlike the OEWS figure above — with about 8,000 openings a year on average, against a 3.5% all-occupation average.

Plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters are projected at +6.8% over the same window, with about 42,000 openings a year.

The direction of each line is the honest headline: the field is projected to grow, and this teaching category is essentially flat.

Teaching is one of the jobs for plumbers off the tools — the trade in a different setting rather than a different trade.

It sits outside the in-trade ladder the plumber career path article maps, and the classroom draws on the field years instead of restarting the clock.

The move itself is a sequence of questions, answered one school at a time:

Weigh any offer with the section above open: both medians come from the same May 2025 release, and against the same 3.5% all-occupation benchmark the field is projected at +6.8% while the teaching category sits at −0.3%.

The schedule is the variable our data cannot price — that one you ask the school about.

If teaching is not the right fit, the off-the-tools article maps the other exits, from inspection to estimating to facilities work.

This page is career information, not legal or licensing advice. Teaching-credential questions go to each hiring school — ask which state authority, if any, sets rules for its instructors; trade-licence questions go to the board that issues the licence.