Trade hub · BLS OEWS May 2025

Welder

Use hand-welding, flame-cutting, hand-soldering, or brazing equipment to weld or join metal components or to fill holes, indentations, or seams of fabricated metal products.

National wage distribution. Source: BLS OEWS, May 2025 (SOC 51-4121)

Where the pay is

The gap between states is wide: Alaska pays about 69% more than Arkansas at the median. Cost of living closes part of that gap. In licensed states the credential itself also travels differently across borders, which changes what a move is worth.

Source: BLS OEWS, May 2025 · licensing per state boards, verified July 2026

Outlook to 2034

BLS projects employment moving from 457,300 in 2024 to 467,200 in 2034 (+2.2%). Typical entry-level education: high school diploma or equivalent. Annual openings run near 45,600. That figure counts both new positions and replacements for workers leaving the occupation, which is why it exceeds the growth number. The 2024 figure here is larger than the employment count in the summary above because these are two different BLS programs: the summary counts jobs surveyed at employers, while the projections program also counts the self-employed, and this trade has a lot of them.

Licensing

39 states require no license at all for this trade. The credential that carries weight is industry certification rather than a state card.

Comparing states rather than reading one at a time:

• Which states require a welder license, and what replaces one where none exists

Requirements by state

0 of the 10 state pages built for this trade are released so far, each with the board pages its facts came from and the date they were checked. The rest are written and go out in later waves. That includes states where the license is issued by cities rather than the state, and states that regulate only at the contractor level: those pages say so plainly and name the authority that decides, because "no state license" is itself the answer someone is looking for. 40 states are not in this table: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wyoming. Their records carry too little beyond the licensing model itself to make a page worth reading, so the model is shown in the comparison tables instead of being padded into a page.

Source: state licensing boards. Verified July 2026.

Price a credential with the license cost estimator, weigh training paths with the apprenticeship vs. school calculator, or set this trade against others in your state with the salary comparison.

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