Lineman Salary in North Carolina 2026,
$77,270 Median | BLS Data by City

The published figure is $77,270 a year, or $37.15 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, on SOC 49-9051 — Electrical Power-Line Installers and Repairers, a row broader than lineman alone. The band runs from $48,180 at the 10th percentile to $105,430 at the 90th, and the state figure sits 18.9% below the national median of $95,320.

Winston-Salem, at $98,720, and it is not close: Goldsboro follows at $85,900, then Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia $81,740, Asheville $80,220 and Greensboro-High Point $79,190. The Piedmont concentration of transmission and line-construction contracting, rather than local distribution alone, is what puts Winston-Salem so far clear of the second metro.

No. North Carolina issues no state credential for power-line work — the electrical contractor board covers premises wiring, not utility lines. Entry is controlled by employers through registered apprenticeships run by Duke Energy, the electric membership cooperatives, municipal systems and line-construction contractors. A commercial driver's licence and, usually, a community college lineworker programme are the practical prerequisites.

Because the state's employment is weighted toward distribution rather than transmission. A location quotient of 1.36 on 5,650 jobs shows North Carolina employs a lot of power-line workers, but the volume comes from a dense network of cooperatives and municipal systems doing local distribution on fixed schedules, which pays below the travelling transmission and storm-contractor scale that lifts the national median of $95,320.

It applies a flat 4.5% to everything, with no city or county income tax in the state. For a trade with heavily variable earnings that is worth noting: hurricane restoration and outage overtime are taxed by North Carolina at exactly the same rate as base pay, so an unusually large month does not carry a higher state marginal rate the way it would under a graduated schedule.

Electrical Power-Line Installers and Repairers, which includes distribution linemen, transmission linemen, utility line installers and the cable-splicing and service work attached to them. It is broader than the trade term lineman, and in a state like North Carolina, with a heavy cooperative and municipal footprint, that breadth matters: the row mixes crews on a local system schedule with travelling contractor crews whose earnings are structurally different. That is the honest explanation for a band that runs from $48,180 to $105,430 and an interquartile range of $60,490 to $100,310 — two distributions on one row.

Two of them. First, this is straight-time pay: BLS excludes overtime premium, and storm restoration, mutual-aid deployments and planned outage work are a large part of what a North Carolina lineman actually earns in a year, none of it in this figure. Second, the median mixes apprentices with journeymen and distribution with transmission. A journeyman on a Piedmont transmission crew should read the $100,310 seventy-fifth percentile and the Winston-Salem $98,720 metro median rather than the state midpoint.

More than in most states. North Carolina takes both Atlantic hurricanes and inland ice storms, and its utilities both send and receive mutual-aid crews. Restoration work runs sixteen-hour days at premium rates with per diem and lodging, and a single major event can add a substantial fraction of an annual income — outside the published $77,270 median entirely, because BLS reports straight-time earnings. The flat 4.5% state tax means none of that surge is taxed at a higher state rate, which is why linemen in this state tend to talk about gross annual earnings rather than hourly scale.