Pipefitter Salary in Texas 2026,
$59,840 Median | BLS Data by City

The published figure for the occupation code is a median $59,840 a year, or $28.77 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $38,270 at the 10th percentile to $81,890 at the 90th and quartiles at $47,380 and $74,100. That is 6.2% below the national median of $63,800, before accounting for the fact that Texas levies no income tax. The row is SOC 47-2152, which pools pipefitters with licensed building plumbers.

No. The Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners licenses plumbers, and its jurisdiction covers potable water, sanitary drainage and building gas systems. Industrial process piping in refineries, chemical plants and power stations falls outside that scope entirely, so no state credential is required. What the work does require is procedure qualification — a weld test to a specific ASME or AWS procedure for the material and position — plus site safety orientation and contractor screening.

On the published row, Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos leads at $62,810, but that figure is construction plumbing. For pipefitting specifically the meaningful entries are Beaumont-Port Arthur at $62,220 and Odessa at $61,870 — refinery, petrochemical and oilfield markets — with Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands at $61,300 covering both. Because the SOC code blends the two trades, read the metro table alongside what each market actually builds and maintains.

It is the main driver of the wide upper band, though BLS does not break it out. A turnaround is an intensive maintenance window when a process unit is shut down, and contractors pay premium rates for long hours over compressed periods to get it finished on schedule. That pattern is what produces a $74,100 seventy-fifth percentile and $81,890 ninetieth on a row whose median is $59,840. It also means annual earnings in this trade are lumpy and depend heavily on how many turnaround seasons a fitter works.

Through the employer and the code, not the state. The route is typically a helper position, then apprenticeship through a union local or a contractor's own programme, then weld testing to the procedures a site requires. Qualification is specific — a procedure covers a material, thickness range and position — so a fitter accumulates qualifications rather than holding one credential. Site access additionally requires safety orientation and, at most refineries and chemical plants, contractor screening.

Because the licence exists to protect the public water supply and building occupants, not to certify skill in general. Potable water, sanitary drainage and building gas systems are where defective work endangers people who have no way to inspect it, and that is the scope the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners covers. Industrial process piping is governed instead by process safety management regulation, mechanical integrity programmes and code qualification enforced through the plant operator and its insurers — a regime that is arguably more demanding than a state licence but that operates entirely through private and federal channels. The consequence for this page is that one wage row contains an occupation with a state supply barrier and one without.

Scale and continuity. Texas holds a very large share of United States refining and petrochemical capacity, and that capacity requires mechanical integrity work continuously — inspection, repair, replacement — with periodic turnarounds that concentrate demand sharply. The result is a labour market where a skilled procedure-qualified fitter can work more or less continuously by following turnaround schedules between plants, and where the earnings pattern is more like project work than like a salaried trade. Beaumont-Port Arthur at $62,220 is the clearest published expression of that market, and the growth layered on top — liquefied natural gas export terminals, hydrogen and carbon capture process plant — sits in the same corridor.

Three things. The earnings pattern is lumpy and travel-dependent, so the $59,840 median describes an average across very different working years. The qualifications are employer- and code-administered rather than state-issued, which makes them portable across states but means there is no licence to fall back on if the industrial market contracts. And the absence of a Texas income tax is worth more here than on most pages precisely because the income is concentrated — there is no bracket effect to penalise a heavy turnaround year. Against that, the Gulf coast market is exposed to the refining and petrochemical cycle in a way that building plumbing is not.