Underwater Welder Salary in Texas 2026,
$53,340 Median | BLS Data by City

BLS does not publish an underwater welding wage, so no honest state figure exists for it. The nearest published row is Welders, Cutters, Solderers, and Brazers, which shows a Texas median of $53,340 a year, or $25.64 an hour, per OEWS May 2025 across 52,000 mostly surface welding jobs. Commercial diving compensation works on day rates, depth and saturation premiums and project contracts, and is not measured by this row.

No. There is no SOC code for underwater or diving welders. The two rows that touch the work are Welders, Cutters, Solderers, and Brazers — used on this page — and Commercial Divers, and neither isolates people who weld underwater. Any figure presented as a BLS underwater welding salary has been constructed from something else, and the honest position is to say so.

No state licence exists. Commercial diving is controlled by federal occupational and maritime safety rules and by private certification: a commercial diving school qualification, an annual diving medical, welding certification to a recognised standard with a separate underwater qualification, and the diving contractor's own audit and competency regime. Texas has no involvement at any stage, which means the schools and contractors are effectively the gatekeepers.

Odessa at $63,470, then Midland $61,410, Corpus Christi $59,450, Beaumont-Port Arthur $59,190 and Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos $59,040. The pattern is unmistakable: the Permian Basin and the Gulf Coast petrochemical corridor pay above the state median because pipeline, refinery and turnaround work carries premium rates and long overtime, while general fabrication does not.

It is realistic but it should be entered with clear eyes. The training is expensive and privately provided, the diving medical is demanding and annual, early work is usually inland and tending rather than offshore, and the physical attrition rate is high. The Gulf of Mexico does support a genuine commercial diving industry, including inspection, repair and increasingly decommissioning of ageing structures. But the eye-catching earnings figures that circulate belong to experienced saturation divers, not to entrants, and none of them appear in the published data on this page.

Because it is the most defensible published figure available, and because pretending otherwise would be worse. BLS has no occupation for underwater welders; the two adjacent rows are general welding and commercial divers, and neither isolates the work. This page uses the welding row, states plainly that it measures surface welding, and does not convert it into a diving claim. The alternative approaches are both dishonest: presenting a general welding median as an underwater welding salary, or publishing an invented figure sourced from job boards and industry anecdote. What the welding row genuinely supports is a description of the trade a diver-welder comes from — 52,000 jobs in Texas, concentrated in the Permian and the Gulf Coast, paying above the state median for pipe and turnaround work.

On a fundamentally different basis from an annual wage. Divers are typically paid a base rate plus a diving day rate, with additional premiums layered by depth, by the use of mixed gas, and by saturation — where a diver lives under pressure in a chamber system for extended periods and is paid a per-day saturation rate for the entire time, not merely for time in the water. Work is project-based and often contracted rather than employed, weather-dependent, and concentrated into intense periods followed by gaps. The consequence is that annual earnings vary enormously between individuals and between years, and that a single 'salary' figure is close to meaningless for the occupation. That is exactly why BLS's absence of a row for it is not an oversight.

It has three parts, and they are moving in different directions. Inspection, maintenance and repair of existing offshore infrastructure is steady work driven by regulatory inspection cycles and by the age of the structures. New offshore construction tracks capital spending decisions and is cyclical. Decommissioning — removing platforms and pipelines that have reached the end of their productive life — is a growing category, because a large population of ageing Gulf structures has to be dealt with, and it is diving-intensive. Alongside all of it sits inland and coastal work: harbours, bridges, intakes, dams and marine terminals, which is where most divers actually start. A welder in Texas considering the path should look at that inland market first, because it is where the entry-level jobs are.