Run and test the gas piping behind every furnace, water heater and restaurant range. Get it wrong and a building comes down.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Licensed
$63,800
Apprentice
$44,150
Senior, union or utility
$108,420
The national median is $63,800 a year, and the bottom tenth start near $44,150. The federal wage survey has no separate gasfitter category: it counts plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters as one group, and gas work sits inside that. Gas utility technicians are counted elsewhere and tend to be paid better than the group median.
About $18 to $24 an hour
First-year apprentice, with a raise every six months or every year
Apprentice wages are set as a percentage of the licensed rate, usually starting around 45 to 50 percent and climbing to 85 or 90 percent by the final year. You learn on the customer's time, not on your own money.
$32 to $50 an hour
Roughly $66,000 to $104,000 a year at full-time hours
Gas utility service crews, union commercial work and on-call emergency response pay at the top. Overtime is normal in winter, when every furnace in the region decides to fail at once.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
This is paid work from the first week, so there is no tuition bill to find. The low end is a union apprenticeship where the classroom blocks are covered, a starter set of hand tools built up slowly, and the state or city licence fee at the end. The high end is a non union or community college program charging roughly $2,500 a year for the classroom part across four years, a full tool kit, your own combustible gas detector and manometer, and the licence. Most people finish this trade with savings rather than student debt.
Because you are paid the whole way through, most people finish this trade with savings instead of student debt. Registered apprenticeships are listed on apprenticeship.gov, the United States Department of Labor site, and cost you nothing to join.
A union pension
The United Association, the plumbers and pipefitters union, runs some of the strongest retirement plans left in the American trades.
Health and dental from early in the apprenticeship
Often from your first few months in a union local.
Overtime and call-out pay
Gas leaks and dead furnaces do not wait for Monday, and emergency call-outs pay a premium.
A work van and fuel
Service companies supply the vehicle and stock it.
A license nobody can take from you
Once you hold it, you can work for anyone or for yourself.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
An apprenticeship, not a degree. About four fifths on the job, one fifth in a classroom.
Finish high school
Grade 12
Math, shop and physics. Get a driver's license, because no service company will hire you without one.
Get taken on as an apprentice
Weeks to months
Apply to a union local, a mechanical contractor, a gas utility or a non-union training program. This is the hard step, and persistence beats grades.
Register the apprenticeship
Days
With your state apprenticeship agency or the federal Office of Apprenticeship, so your hours are recorded and count toward the license.
Work and study
4 to 5 years
Typically four to five years, roughly 8,000 hours on the job plus several hundred classroom hours a year covering gas codes, venting, combustion, sizing and safety.
Sit the license exam
After your hours
Your state or city board tests you on the gas code and on practical work. Pass it and you are licensed to work unsupervised.
Math
Pipe sizing is arithmetic with tables, and getting it wrong starves an appliance or over-pressures a line.
Physics and chemistry
Combustion, pressure and gas behavior are the whole trade.
Shop or welding
Threading, brazing and welding pipe are daily skills.
English
You read code books and write inspection paperwork that has legal weight.
There is no single United States gas fitting license. A few states license gas fitters as their own trade: Massachusetts runs a Board of State Examiners of Plumbers and Gas Fitters, and Virginia issues a gas fitter tradesman license through its Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation. Elsewhere gas work is folded into the plumbing license, the heating license, or a city permit. The technical rules travel better than the licenses do: most of the country builds to the National Fuel Gas Code or the International Fuel Gas Code. Check your own state board before you pick a program, because these licenses do not automatically transfer.
Union apprenticeship
Local training centers run by the United Association, the plumbers and pipefitters union. Free tuition, a wage from week one, and a pension at the end.
Non-union contractor programs
Run by associations such as the Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors Association and by large mechanical firms.
Community college
A one-year plumbing or gas certificate gets you noticed by employers who are tired of hiring people who quit in month two.
Gas utilities
The local gas company trains its own service and distribution technicians and pays well while doing it.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Master plumber or master gas fitter
The license you need to pull permits and run your own company. An extra exam after years at the journey level.
Pipe welding certification
Certified welders on gas and process piping earn more than almost anyone else in the trade.
HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) certification
Combining gas with furnace and boiler work makes you a one-truck solution for a homeowner.
Medical gas certification
Hospital oxygen and vacuum piping is a licensed specialty with very few qualified installers.
Propane certification
Rural and recreational propane systems follow their own rules and need their own training.
CDL (commercial driver's license)
Needed for larger service trucks and utility vehicles, and usually worth a raise.
Safety cards
The 10-hour and 30-hour construction courses from OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) are cheap and asked for on commercial sites.
Customer manner
You are in someone's kitchen telling them their water heater is unsafe. How you say it decides whether you get the job.
Confined space and excavation training
Essential for utility distribution work, where the pipe is in a trench.
Several cities and states are limiting new gas hookups in new buildings, and electric heat pumps are replacing gas furnaces in new construction. That does not end the trade in your lifetime: tens of millions of existing American homes and nearly every commercial kitchen burn gas, and all of it needs service, replacement and safety work for decades. But the smart move is to build a wider skill set, plumbing, heating or welding alongside gas, so you are not the last person holding one shrinking specialty.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Load the van by 7am and take your first call. Morning might be a new water heater: shut off the gas, cut and re-pipe, check the vent, pressure test the line, relight and check the flame. Afternoon could be a restaurant fit-out, running black iron pipe to six appliances and sizing it so the fryer and the range can both run flat out. Somewhere in the week a leak call: sniff it out with a detector, isolate it, repair it, and test it twice. New construction days are quieter and longer, roughing in a whole building before the walls close.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
The rotten-egg odor is a chemical called mercaptan added on purpose so leaks can be noticed. It was made standard after a Texas school heated by unodorized gas exploded in 1937 and killed hundreds of children and teachers.
About half of households in the country heat with natural gas, and millions more cook with it or use it for hot water. Every one of those systems needs somebody qualified to install, test and eventually replace it.
A clean gas flame burns blue. Yellow or orange means incomplete combustion, which produces carbon monoxide, a gas you cannot see or smell. Reading flames properly is one of the first things an apprentice is taught.
New gas piping is sealed and pumped up with air, then watched on a gauge for a set time. If the needle moves at all, there is a leak and nothing gets connected. It is the closest thing the trade has to a final exam, and it happens on every job.
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.