Lineman Salary in Texas 2026,
$78,940 Median | BLS Data by City

Texas power-line installers and repairers earn a median $78,940 a year, $37.95 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with the middle half between $60,150 and $99,110 and a full range of $46,760 to $107,550. That is 17.2% below the $95,320 national median, though Texas takes no income tax and storm overtime can add substantially to actual earnings.

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands at $82,710, then Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos at $82,120, College Station-Bryan at $81,390, Waco at $80,610 and Beaumont-Port Arthur at $80,500. The table is tight, spanning about two thousand dollars, because Texas line work is priced by utility and contractor pay scales that apply statewide rather than by local labour markets.

No. Texas licenses electricians through the Department of Licensing and Regulation, but utility line workers on transmission and distribution systems are expressly excluded from that licensing scheme, so there is no state lineman licence. What the work does require is a commercial driver's licence for the trucks, completion of a recognised apprenticeship — the IBEW and NECA Electrical Training Alliance programme or a utility's own — and employer-maintained OSHA and safety qualification.

No. Texas has no personal income tax and no local income tax. That is worth more in this trade than in most, because storm restoration and mutual-aid deployments generate large volumes of overtime, and a Texas lineman keeps all of it apart from federal tax. At the state 75th percentile of $99,110 the saving against a top-bracket state is substantial.

Because the national median is set largely by heavily unionised utility markets in the Northeast, the Midwest and California, where negotiated scales run well above the Texas market. Texas's line work is dominated by non-union contractors and cooperatives operating on competitively bid rates. The state has 1.46 times the national concentration of the trade and still a $78,940 median — abundant work at contractor rates rather than scarce work at scale rates.

It means continuous demand and a distinct risk profile. Texas operates its own interconnection, so grid reliability is a state-level political and regulatory issue in a way it is not elsewhere, and the response to recent weather events has funded sustained hardening, rebuild and vegetation programmes. On top of that, the interconnection queue for wind, solar and battery projects across West Texas and the Panhandle requires collector and transmission construction on a scale few states match. That is why the location quotient is 1.46 and why the $99,110 seventy-fifth percentile is reachable through transmission work.

SOC 49-9051 is a close rather than exact match for lineman, and the annualised figure excludes the overtime that defines this trade's real earnings. A Texas lineman working a hurricane or ice-storm restoration can bank a substantial fraction of an annual salary in a few weeks, and none of it appears in the published median. The $46,760 tenth percentile, meanwhile, is groundman and first-year apprentice pay, not journeyman pay — the $78,940 median is the journeyman marker.

On a different basis from ordinary line work. Restoration and mutual-aid deployments run sixteen-hour days for consecutive weeks at overtime and double-time rates, with per diem on top, and Texas's hurricane and ice-storm exposure means this recurs. Utilities and contractors also pay premiums for transmission qualification and for troubleman roles that respond alone to faults. Stacking transmission qualification with storm availability is the practical route from the Texas median of $78,940 to the $107,550 ninetieth percentile — with no state tax taken from any of it.