Meter Technician Salary 2026,
What Meter Technicians Actually Earn

How much do meter technicians make in 2026?

Meter technicians are counted in the BLS control and valve installers and repairers series: OEWS May 2025 puts the SOC 49-9012 national median at $74,340 a year ($35.74 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $45,910 and the top 10% at $112,500. The series pools metering with gas distribution and instrumentation crafts, so it describes a family of utility technical trades rather than metering alone — and within that family, meter work has changed more than any other part in the last fifteen years. Advanced metering infrastructure eliminated most manual reading and a large share of routine field visits, and simultaneously created a more technical role: installing and commissioning communicating meters, maintaining the network that carries their data, diagnosing communication faults, and doing the meter shop work of testing, calibrating and certifying meters for accuracy under state regulation. The technicians who did well out of that transition are the ones who moved toward the electrical, communications and diagnostic end. Position in the band follows exactly that: routine exchange work sits low, complex commercial and industrial metering with instrument transformers, current transformer wiring and revenue-grade accuracy testing sits high. Employment is projected to grow 1.3% through 2034 with roughly 3,900 openings a year. → Full meter technician career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $74,340 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 49-9012, 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 →