Drywall Finisher Salary 2026,
What Drywall Finishers Actually Earn

How much do drywall finishers make in 2026?

Drywall finishers are counted in the BLS tapers series: OEWS May 2025 gives the SOC 47-2082 national median as $68,270 a year ($32.82 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $43,670 and the top 10% at $107,110. Two things about that stand out. First, it is a small, dedicated occupation of about 12,840 workers — far smaller than the drywall hanging trade — because finishing is a genuine craft skill that takes years to do fast and flat, and many people never acquire it. Second, the median sits well above the hanging trade, which reflects that reality: a finisher controls the visible result, and a bad taping job is the defect an owner sees for the life of the building. Pay inside the band separates on speed with automatic taping tools, on level-4 versus level-5 finish capability, and on the ability to work in occupied and high-end spaces where dust control and coordination matter as much as the coating. Spray application and texture matching add further scope. Like hanging, much of this work is priced by area rather than by the hour, so output translates directly into earnings. Employment is projected to change by 0.1% through 2034 with roughly 1,100 openings a year. → Full drywall finisher career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $68,270 blends every experience level and every setting in this occupation. For pay by level alone, see Pay by Level below.

Published (BLS): BLS OEWS May 2025, SOC 47-2082, United States national estimate. Public, methodologically rigorous, but sampled on a rolling 3-year basis and published ~10 months after collection — so it reflects wages that are already 1–2 years old by the time you read them.

Level and certification medians: distributed across the published BLS percentile range for this SOC code (P10 through P90) according to the credential tiers this occupation actually hires at. They are modeled reference points, not separately surveyed wages.

State and metro figures: modeled — the BLS national median multiplied by the GlobalCybers state wage index, and for metros by the published metro index for that state. They are estimates of local pay, not BLS state or metropolitan-area observations, and are labelled as modeled in the tables below.

No verified placement sample:GlobalCybers does not yet publish a placement median for this role, so no "verified" figure appears anywhere on this page.

Full site methodology & data sources →