Relay Technician Salary 2026,
What Relay Technicians Actually Earn

How much do relay technicians make in 2026?

Relay technicians are counted in the BLS electrical and electronics repairers, powerhouse, substation and relay series: OEWS May 2025 puts SOC 49-2095 at a national median of $103,020 a year ($49.53 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $65,730 and the top 10% at $129,920. That is among the highest medians of any craft occupation, and the series is small — 20,720 workers — because the skill set takes years to build and the employers are few. The work is protective relaying: testing, calibrating, setting and commissioning the relays and schemes that detect faults on the power system and clear them in cycles. Get it wrong and either a fault is not cleared, which destroys equipment and endangers people, or a healthy circuit trips, which puts customers in the dark. That asymmetry is what the pay reflects. Position inside the band follows scheme complexity: technicians doing routine distribution relay testing sit lower, while those commissioning transmission line protection, differential and pilot schemes, and modern microprocessor relays with communications-based protection sit at the top. This is heavily regulated-utility and specialist contractor employment, with structured progression and, in much of the country, union representation. Employment is projected to grow 5.5% through 2034 with roughly 2,000 openings a year. → Full relay technician career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $103,020 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 49-2095, 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 →