Welder Salary in Tennessee 2026,
$48,040 Median | BLS Data by City

A median $48,040 a year, or $23.10 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with the middle half between $41,600 and $57,450 and a full range of $37,840 to $64,200. That is 10.6% below the $53,750 national median — largely a supply effect, since Tennessee employs welders at forty-three per cent above the national concentration.

Kingsport-Bristol at $55,690, more than seven and a half thousand above the state median. Clarksville follows at $52,970, then Nashville at $49,460, Chattanooga at $49,220 and Memphis at $48,600. The Tri-Cities premium comes from the chemical and heavy industrial plant maintenance base there, which pays code-qualified rates rather than production rates.

No. Tennessee issues no welding licence and maintains no registry. What matters instead is procedure qualification: AWS certification under D1.1 or the relevant process code, ASME Section IX qualification for pressure work, and the employer weld test most Tennessee shops administer on the day of hire. Because there is no state credential, your qualification papers and your ability to pass a test are the whole of your résumé in practical terms.

At the top of this band. The $57,450 seventy-fifth percentile and the $64,200 ninetieth reflect pipe, pressure and plant maintenance work rather than production welding, and 6G pipe qualification plus ASME Section IX is the combination that gets you there. The Kingsport-Bristol figure of $55,690 is where that work concentrates in Tennessee, around the chemical and industrial plants, and shutdown and turnaround work adds overtime on top of the base rate.

It depends entirely on which half of the band you plan to be in. The $37,840 tenth percentile is repetitive production welding, and that is the part of the trade most exposed to automation — Tennessee's automotive plants have been robotising it for years. The $57,450 seventy-fifth percentile is above the $53,750 national median, and it belongs to code-qualified pipe, pressure and maintenance welders whose work is hard to automate and in steady demand across the state's chemical and industrial base. The occupation's 2.2% projected national growth is an average of those two very different trajectories.

Because a location quotient of 1.43 is a supply statement. Tennessee's manufacturing base — automotive assembly at Smyrna, Spring Hill and Chattanooga, a deep supplier network, chemical and heavy industry around Kingsport, and the emerging Ford BlueOval City complex in the west — has produced both a large volume of welding jobs and a large pool of trained welders through the state's technical colleges. Where supply is plentiful, employers do not need to bid up. The consequence is that the state average is soft while the specialised end of the market, where supply is genuinely tight, pays above the national median.

Overtime. Welding earnings in Tennessee's industrial maintenance and shutdown work depend heavily on hours, and an annual wage median does not separate a straight forty-hour production job from a turnaround schedule. It also treats a robotic welding cell operator and a 6G pipe welder as the same occupation, which they are not — in skill, in market or in exposure to automation. Read $48,040 as the production anchor and price the specialised work separately.

Qualification and process, in that order. Move from production welding to code-governed work: AWS D1.1 structural qualification first, then ASME Section IX and 6G pipe qualification, which are what the $57,450 seventy-fifth percentile and the $64,200 ninetieth are made of. Geography helps if you go to the right place — Kingsport-Bristol at $55,690 rather than Memphis at $48,600. Industrial plant maintenance and shutdown work pays overtime that production work does not. And in a state with no welding licence, keeping your qualification papers current and being able to pass a weld test cold is worth more than any other credential.