Build and repair the huge steel vessels that hold steam and pressure, in power plants, refineries and shipyards.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$76,410
First years
$50,490
Top tenth
$110,370
The national median is $76,410 a year and the bottom tenth earn about $50,490. That median assumes steady work. Real earnings swing hard, because most of the money is made during plant shutdowns when crews work long weeks of overtime.
Starts near half the journeyman rate
First year apprentice, rising every six months or year
Registered apprentice pay is set as a percentage of the fully qualified rate and climbs on a written schedule until you finish. You never pay tuition for the classroom part.
60 to 70 hour weeks
Refinery and power plant outages, a few weeks at a time
Overtime pays time and a half or double time, and traveling crews usually get a daily allowance for food and lodging on top. The flip side is weeks or months with no work between outages.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
Apprenticeship classroom training is paid for by the program and you earn a wage the whole time, so the low end is boots, a welding hood, gloves and hand tools. The high end adds a community college welding certificate taken before you apply, a fuller kit, and welding tests you pay for yourself rather than having an employer cover them. This is one of the few paths where you can finish training with savings instead of student loans.
This is one of the few paths where you can finish training with savings instead of student loans.
Defined benefit pension
Union boilermakers build a pension from their first hour worked, one of the strongest in the trades.
Health and dental for the family
Paid by hours banked into the fund, which is why steady hours matter so much.
Travel allowance and lodging
Paid when a job sends you out of your home area.
Annuity on top of the pension
Many local agreements put an extra hourly amount into a retirement account.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
A paid apprenticeship, not a degree. Roughly four years, most of it working.
High school diploma or an equivalency certificate
Grade 12
Shop, welding and math classes help. You need to be 18 and pass a drug test and a physical.
Apply to a local apprenticeship
Weeks to a year of waiting
Applications open in windows, not all year. Local lodges of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers run the main programs, and there are open shop programs too.
Get indentured and start work
Immediately
You are a paid employee from the first day, working alongside qualified boilermakers.
Work plus classroom training
About 4 years
Registered apprenticeships run on a minimum of about 2,000 hours of paid work plus roughly 144 hours of classroom instruction a year.
Journeyman boilermaker
After the hours
Finish your hours, pass your welding tests, and you are qualified nationwide.
Welding or metal shop
The fastest way to make an application stand out.
Math
Layout work is geometry and trigonometry with a tape measure.
Physics
Rigging and load calculations are physics you can get hurt by.
Drafting or blueprint reading
Every job starts with a drawing.
No state issues a boilermaker license the way it does for electricians or plumbers. What is regulated is the work itself. Boilers and pressure vessels are built and repaired to a national code, and the welders on them have to pass qualification tests for each welding procedure and position. Those test certificates are your real credential, and they expire if you stop using them.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Extra welding qualifications
Stainless, chrome alloy and pipe positions. Each one opens jobs others cannot take.
Rigging and crane signaling
Moving heavy sections safely is a specialty in itself.
Inspection training
Learning to test welds without cutting them open leads to inspector work with better hours.
Foreman and supervisor courses
Running a crew during an outage pays a premium.
A welding certificate before you apply
A one year community college program makes you an obvious pick.
Driver's license and a reliable vehicle
Work sites are rarely near transit and often in another state.
Confined space and fall protection training
Short courses that every site requires anyway.
Willingness to travel
Boilermakers who chase outages nationwide earn far more than those who stay home.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Report at 6am for a safety briefing. Climb into a cooled boiler, sometimes through a hatch barely wider than your shoulders, and cut out damaged tube sections. Rig the new sections in with chain falls, fit them, weld them, then help pressure test the vessel before the plant restarts. Twelve hour days, six days a week, for three or four weeks, then it is over and you look for the next one.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
The International Brotherhood of Boilermakers traces its founding to 1880, back when boilers powered almost every factory, ship and locomotive in the country.
Steam boilers are still made, but a lot of modern boilermaker work is on pressure vessels, storage tanks, refinery equipment and pollution control systems. The name stuck long after the work changed.
Nineteenth century boiler explosions killed thousands of people and led to the first national construction codes for pressure equipment in the United States. Those codes are still why every weld gets tested.
Welds on pressure equipment are routinely checked by radiography or ultrasound. If a weld fails, it is cut out and done again, and your name is on the record either way.
Last checked September 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in United States dollars, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published pay scales. They vary by state, employer and experience. Tuition is for in-state students at public schools unless the card says otherwise.