Wind Turbine Technician Salary in Texas 2026,
$61,950 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Texas figure is $61,950 a year, or $29.79 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $48,830 at the 10th percentile to $78,280 at the 90th and quartiles at $57,810 and $72,950. That is 3.4% below the national median of $64,120 in gross terms, with no Texas income tax applying. The row is SOC 49-9081, an exact match to the occupation.

Only three Texas metros publish a figure: Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands at $64,050, Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos at $61,930 and Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington at $57,890. None of them contains significant wind generation — the turbines are in the Panhandle, west Texas and the coastal plain, in counties too small for a metro publication. Those figures reflect where operators and service companies base staff, not where the work happens.

No. Texas issues no licence and no board regulates the occupation. What controls site access is industry training: the Global Wind Organisation basic safety suite covering working at height, first aid, manual handling and fire awareness, refreshed on a fixed cycle, plus electrical safety and rescue-from-height certification. Many roles also require a commercial driver licence for service vehicles. Employers administer and usually pay for all of it.

Because Texas's wind sector is mature and competitive rather than new and scarce. A location quotient of 4.30 across 3,890 jobs means the state has more than four times the national density of these technicians, with a well-developed training pipeline through community colleges and manufacturer programmes. States entering wind development more recently have to bid for technicians who are not yet locally available. Texas does not — which is why the highest state medians on this row belong to smaller wind states.

Yes, and it is visible in the data. The band ends at $78,280 with quartiles at $57,810 and $72,950 — a compressed distribution with no long tail. Site supervision, travelling major-correction work and repowering campaigns reach the top of it. Beyond that, progression means moving off the turbine: into site or fleet management, into engineering and reliability support, or into an adjacent energy trade. Someone planning a twenty-year career should have that transition in view from early on.

That Texas has solved the supply problem other states are still working on. A 4.30 location quotient with a 3.4% wage deficit is the signature of a mature market: the training pipeline works, community colleges and manufacturer programmes produce technicians in the numbers the fleet requires, and employers do not have to pay a scarcity premium. In states building wind capacity more recently, the technicians have to be attracted from elsewhere and the wage reflects that. The practical implication for a candidate is that Texas is the easiest place in the country to enter this occupation and not the best-paying — and that the credentials earned here transfer anywhere, since they are industry rather than state credentials.

It is the replacement of major components — nacelles, drivetrains, blades — on existing towers, and it is becoming a large share of Texas wind work because the state's installed fleet includes a substantial cohort of turbines old enough to justify it. Repowering campaigns are project work: crane-intensive, schedule-driven, and staffed by travelling crews rather than by resident site technicians. That is where the $72,950 seventy-fifth percentile and $78,280 ninetieth largely sit, and it is a different working pattern from routine site maintenance. A technician who wants the upper band should be positioning for major-correction and repowering work rather than for a comfortable single-site posting.

More than most people entering the field realise. Texas operates its own interconnection, largely separate from the rest of the country, with a market design that pays for energy rather than for capacity. That has made Texas an unusually attractive place to build wind — hence the 4.30 location quotient — and it also means the economics of individual projects, and therefore the service contracts attached to them, respond to ERCOT market conditions rather than to national policy. For a technician the relevance is that the work is concentrated where the grid economics favour generation, which is why the fleet sits in the Panhandle, west Texas and the coastal plain rather than near the metros where the employers are headquartered.