There is no single number behind the phrase union plumber salary: each UA local negotiates its own wage scale, so the answer to how much union plumbers make is whatever your local's agreement says.
For the trade overall, BLS put the median at $30.67 an hour, or $63,800 a year, in May 2025.
Full-time union members in construction and extraction occupations earned $1,561 a week at the median, against $1,004 for non-union workers.
Here is how the pay is set.
How union plumber pay is set
Union plumber pay is bargained, not posted.
A UA local and the signatory contractors in its area negotiate a collective bargaining agreement, and the hourly rates inside it are what tradespeople call scale: a base journeyman wage, apprentice rates that rise through the apprenticeship, and the other pay provisions the two sides negotiate.
Each local bargains its own agreement.
There is no national UA scale to look up.
Federal statistics can't give you the union number, because there isn't one.
BLS tracks the trade as one occupation — Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters (SOC 47-2152) — which combines plumbers with pipefitters, steamfitters, sprinkler fitters and gas fitters, and counts union and non-union workers together.
There is no separate BLS wage for plumbers only, and no union-only wage anywhere in its tables.
How common is union membership around this trade?
The U.S. union membership rate was 10.0% of wage and salary workers in 2025.
In construction and extraction occupations — the group that contains plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters — 16.4% of employed wage-and-salary workers were union members in 2025, and 17.4% were represented by a union.
In the construction industry as a whole, 11.1% were members and 12.0% were represented.
Because every rate is local, the practical skill is reading a rate sheet.
Ask your local for its current one: it lists the base wage for each classification plus the employer contribution lines that sit on top.
That sheet, updated whenever the agreement is renegotiated, is the only current source for what a union plumber is paid in that jurisdiction — our research verified no individual local's rates, and a generic figure you find online belongs to somebody else's local, possibly years ago.
For how the union itself is organized — the locals, joining, dues — see our guide to the plumbers union (UA).
Scale is local, and it moves
Wage vs total package
Two different numbers get called union plumber pay.
The first is the wage: the base hourly rate for your classification — the number people mean by scale.
The second is the total package: the wage plus the employer contributions the agreement directs on the worker's behalf, such as benefit and pension fund contributions.
The contributions, not the wage, are the part of the package that never reaches the paycheck and never appears in a wage statistic.
This matters every time you compare figures.
BLS wage statistics measure base pay: the OEWS numbers exclude overtime pay, shift differentials, non-production bonuses and benefits.
So the $63,800 median on this page — and every state figure on our salary pages — is a wage-only number, and a union offer's wage line understates the compensation that arrives with it.
The pension piece shows how local the package really is.
The United Association National Pension Fund (UANPF) is a multiemployer defined-benefit plan funded solely by employer contributions and investment earnings — participants make no employee contributions — and its benefit amounts depend on years of pension credit, the hourly contribution rate, age and marital status.
But not every UA local participates in the national fund: bargaining units join at different times, their contribution rates vary, and many locals run their own plans instead.
Which plan applies to you, and at what contribution rate, is written into your local's agreement.
Dues sit on the other side of the ledger.
Each local sets its own dues, and our research did not verify the amounts — one more reason two locals' packages are not directly comparable.
What the rest of the package includes is just as local, and the local's current agreement is the only complete answer.
Scale by region
BLS's May 2025 wage data (released May 15, 2026) show how wide the regional spread is for the combined trade.
The top-paying states by annual median wage: District of Columbia $101,020; Illinois $99,950; Oregon $97,050; Minnesota $94,410; Alaska $93,920.
BLS counts DC as a state in these rankings.
All of these figures combine union and non-union workers — BLS publishes no union-only wage anywhere in the OEWS tables.
Note what the ranking does and doesn't say.
The states with the most plumber, pipefitter and steamfitter jobs are California (47,660 jobs), Texas (44,090), Florida (29,260), New York (23,210) and Illinois (16,750) — the biggest job markets are not the top-paying states, and neither California nor Texas makes the top five on pay.
A local's scale tracks the agreement negotiated in its own jurisdiction, and on federally funded Davis-Bacon construction there is a separate posted wage determination for the work, which registered apprentices may be paid a percentage of per their program.
For the full picture — every state's median, mean and percentiles — see the state-by-state tables on our plumber salary page.
Read them as trade-wide numbers: they include union shops and merit shops together, and the union wage in any one local sits above or below its state's median depending on what that local negotiated.
Apprentice scale
Union apprentices earn from day one.
Most plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters learn the trade through a 4- or 5-year apprenticeship, with 2,000 hours of paid on-the-job training plus technical instruction in a typical year, and those programs are sponsored by unions, trade associations and businesses.
UA apprenticeships are registered with the U.S. Department of Labor, and the local's joint apprenticeship and training committee — the JATC — runs the program.
Apprentices earn less than fully trained plumbers, and their pay increases as they learn to do more.
Neither BLS nor our research gives you a starting number: BLS publishes no apprentice wage figure, and no generic UA or PHCC percentage ladder was verified — the steps vary by local JATC and collective bargaining agreement.
A page that quotes one universal apprentice percentage is guessing.
What federal law sets is the shape, not the percentage.
Registered apprenticeship programs must have a progressively increasing schedule of wages, consistent with the skill acquired, and the entry wage cannot be below the federal minimum wage where it applies (29 CFR 29.5(b)(5)).
Federal rules do not set apprentice pay as a fixed percentage of the journeyworker rate — those percentage steps come from each program's standards or its collective bargaining agreement, not from Washington.
On Davis-Bacon federal construction the apprentice rules have teeth: an apprentice may be paid below the posted wage-determination rate only if individually registered in a DOL- or state-registered program, and their rate is a percentage of the journeyworker rate per the registered program.
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.
Your own percentages are written into your local's agreement and program standards — the JATC can hand you the current schedule.
Union vs non-union take-home
The only federal union-vs-non-union numbers cover broad occupation groups, and the plumber-relevant one is construction and extraction occupations.
In 2025, full-time union members in that group had median weekly earnings of $1,561 against $1,004 for non-union workers in the same occupation group.
Read that comparison for what it is.
It is raw: not controlled for occupation mix, region, age or experience, and it covers every occupation in the group, not plumbers alone.
BLS publishes no union membership rate and no union pay premium for plumbers, pipefitters or HVAC techs specifically, so treat any “union plumbers earn X% more” claim you encounter as invented — no primary source for one exists.
Take-home is also where the package matters most.
Fund contributions never reach the paycheck, and dues come off the member's side.
On the non-union side, benefits are whatever the employer chooses to provide rather than what an agreement directs — so the wage line alone still doesn't settle the comparison.
The honest comparison is total package against total package, with dues subtracted on the union side and benefits quantified on both.
Ask both employers what the benefits are worth; that question, not the headline hourly rate, answers which job pays more.
Career information, not legal or financial advice. Union wage rates, benefit contributions, dues and apprentice wage schedules are set by each local's agreements and change when they are renegotiated — confirm current figures with the local union before you rely on them, and check licensing questions with your state licensing board or the city or county where licensing is local.