Plumber Salary in Georgia 2026,
$57,200 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Georgia figure is $57,200 a year, or $27.50 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025 — 10.3% below the national median of $63,800 — across a band from $37,680 at the 10th percentile to $80,740 at the 90th. The wage row covers plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters at every licence tier, so it is not a figure for any particular licence level; the licence ladder maps onto the percentiles instead.

Savannah at $60,530, then Brunswick-St. Simons $59,630, Warner Robins $58,500, Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell $58,380 and Athens-Clarke County $57,750. Coastal Georgia outpaying Atlanta is the informative result: port, industrial and resort construction generates demand against a thin local trade workforce, while metropolitan Atlanta has more plumbers competing for the work.

Scope of work permitted. A Class I master licence is restricted to single-family dwellings and smaller residential projects; a Class II master licence is unrestricted and permits commercial and larger work. Both sit above the journeyman licence, and both are issued by the State Construction Industry Licensing Board's Division of Master Plumbers and Journeyman Plumbers. Class II requires more documented experience and is the credential that opens the commercial contracting market, which is where the top of this pay band lives.

Yes. Georgia licenses at both journeyman and master level, which not every state does — many regulate only contractors. A journeyman licence requires documented experience under a licensed plumber plus an examination, and it permits independent work. The graded structure means the percentile ladder on this page has real meaning: helpers near the $37,680 tenth percentile, journeymen around the $45,130 twenty-fifth through the median, and masters toward the $68,640 seventy-fifth percentile and above.

Partly composition and partly market. Georgia's mechanical trade employment skews residential, and residential plumbing pays below the industrial and heavy commercial pipefitting that raises medians in manufacturing-heavy states. Cost of living outside metropolitan Atlanta is also below the national average, which local wage-setting reflects. What the figure does not indicate is a shortage of work — a location quotient of 0.61 shows Georgia employs plumbers at well under the national rate, which is a comparatively tight supply position for the trade.

Because the demand is industrial and the supply is thin. Savannah is one of the busiest container ports in the country, with the warehousing, manufacturing and infrastructure development that follows, and Brunswick-St. Simons combines port activity with resort and high-end residential construction. Both markets need mechanical trades and neither has a large resident pool of them. Atlanta, by contrast, has a deep trade workforce serving a mostly residential and light commercial market, and that depth holds its rate at $58,380 — below both coastal metros.

The category includes pipefitters and steamfitters, whose work in Georgia's industrial and data centre construction differs from building plumbing and cycles differently. Self-employment is the larger omission: Class II master plumbers running their own contracting businesses are the commercial top of this trade and their income is not a wage, so the $80,740 ninetieth percentile understates the ceiling. Overtime on project and shutdown work is absorbed into the annual figure without being visible in it.

Licence tier first, and Georgia's graded system makes it unusually legible — journeyman, then Class I master, then Class II master, each a legal expansion of what the holder may do. Then sector: industrial pipefitting on port, manufacturing and data centre projects pays above residential service and carries substantial project overtime. Then region, with coastal Georgia ahead of Atlanta. And then contracting under a Class II licence, which converts the wage question into a business one.