HVAC technician salaries by state and metro

The median is $61,010 a year, and half the trade earns outside a band running from $48,360 to $77,060. The bottom tenth earn $40,050 or less, the top tenth $95,210 or more, so floor to ceiling is about $55,160 a year on the same job title.

A spread that wide is why one national figure is close to useless for planning. Which end of it you land on turns on three things this survey can speak to: the state you work in, the metro inside it, and the kind of employer who hires you. The first two are below. The third is on the careers page, where the industry breakdown lives.

The closest thing to a starting wage in this data is the 10th percentile, $40,050 nationally. That is not the same as a first-year wage, because the bottom tenth includes anyone earning least for any reason, but it is the floor the market actually pays and it is the number worth checking before enrolling anywhere.

The floor moves across the country almost as much as the median does. Among states with at least 2,000 of these jobs, the highest floor is Massachusetts at $50,820 and the lowest is Oklahoma at $36,050, a difference of about $14,770 before anyone has proved anything.

A high floor tends to mean something different from a high median. It suggests either a licensing regime that keeps untrained people out of the trade, or a union presence setting a rate, or simply an expensive place to live. The state pages on this site cover which of those applies where.

The metros with the most jobs and the metros with the best pay are largely different places. New York-Newark-Jersey City employs the most, 21,820 of them, at a median of $77,990. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara pays the most among metros with at least 500 jobs, $82,050, on 1,740.

The last column in each table is worth more than either of the others. A location quotient of 1.0 means the metro employs this trade at the same rate as the country as a whole. Above it, the trade is concentrated there relative to everything else in the local economy, which tends to mean steadier demand rather than higher pay. Several of the best-paying metros sit well below 1.0: expensive places that need technicians without being built around them.

It is not a forecast. This survey measures what people were paid and how many of them there were, and publishes no growth rate and no projected openings. A page quoting a percentage of future growth from this release is quoting something the release does not contain.

It is not adjusted for cost of living. The metros paying most are largely the ones costing most to live in, and nothing in these tables nets that out. A median of $82,050 in San Jose does not go as far as the same figure would in most of the country.

It counts jobs at establishments rather than people in households, so the self-employed sit outside it entirely. In a trade with as many owner-operators as this one, that is a real gap rather than a technicality. Where BLS suppressed a figure to protect a small number of employers, it appears here as not available rather than being estimated.