Welder Salary in Virginia 2026,
$59,180 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Virginia figure is $59,180 a year, or $28.45 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $42,520 at the 10th percentile to $79,630 at the 90th and quartiles at $49,020 and $65,400. That is 10.1% above the national median of $53,750. The row is SOC 51-4121, Welders, Cutters, Solderers, and Brazers.

No. Virginia does not license the trade and neither the Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation nor any other state body issues a welding credential. What governs the work is procedure qualification under AWS or ASME codes — material, thickness range, position and process — issued by an employer or a testing facility. Naval work adds government and classification society requirements on top.

Staunton-Stuarts Draft at $64,470, then Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk $62,670, Richmond $57,710, Blacksburg-Christiansburg-Radford $57,650 and Charlottesville $57,420. Staunton-Stuarts Draft is a Shenandoah Valley manufacturing market and its lead is worth investigating directly; Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk is the naval shipbuilding and ship repair market.

Substantially more than commercial fabrication. Naval shipbuilding and ship repair work carries government and classification society qualification requirements that are stricter in materials, procedures and documentation than ordinary structural or fabrication welding, and it involves out-of-position and confined-space work at high integrity standards. The qualifications are hard to obtain and take time, which is precisely why they are valuable — and in Hampton Roads there is a large and continuing market for them.

Comparatively yes. A 10.1% premium over the national median, a 10,100-person workforce with about 1,110 pro-rated annual openings, and a naval shipbuilding sector that provides long-cycle federally funded work of exactly the kind automation does not touch. The state's income tax tops out at 5.75% with no local layer. The main caveat is that the premium is not enormous and Virginia trails New Mexico, Oregon, New Jersey and New York on this row.

Because it is the most demanding and most durable welding market in the state. Hampton Roads hosts one of the largest concentrations of naval shipbuilding and ship repair capability anywhere, and the work carries qualification requirements — materials, procedures, documentation, inspection — well beyond commercial fabrication. Two things follow. A welder qualified to those standards has credentials that take years to accumulate and that comparatively few hold, which supports the $65,400 seventy-fifth percentile. And the work itself is federally funded on multi-year programmes, which means it does not track the construction cycle the way most welding employment does. For a welder planning a long career, that combination of difficulty and stability is unusual.

It deserves direct investigation rather than a theory. Staunton-Stuarts Draft publishes $64,470, above Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk's $62,670 and well above Richmond's $57,710, in a Shenandoah Valley market with a manufacturing base rather than a shipbuilding one. With 10,100 welders statewide the metro cells are not tiny, so this is more likely a genuine employer concentration — a large fabrication or equipment manufacturer paying above regional rates — than a sampling artefact. A candidate should identify the employers there specifically rather than assuming the figure describes the general local market.

In the lower part of the band, and Virginia is comparatively protected. Robotic welding has absorbed most repetitive, high-volume, fixed-position production welding. It has not absorbed shipyard work, pipe welding, field maintenance or one-off fabrication, all of which involve variable geometry, access constraints and out-of-position work. Virginia's welding employment is skewed toward shipbuilding, ship repair and fabrication rather than toward production line manufacturing, which means the state's exposure is lower than a heavy manufacturing state's would be. The $42,520-to-$49,020 lower quartile is where the exposure sits, and it is a reason to accumulate qualifications quickly.