Welders Make $150,000? Bring Back Shop Class

1) Most of the pay in welding comes from contract jobs. When looking at salaried/shop welders, you're looking more in the range of $50k-$100k USD/year. When the welders are on contracts, they're typically on 4 week on / 1 week off rotations or further out (6/2 and 8/2 are not unusual).

2) When the welders are on contract work and on rotation, they'll be working 12 hours/day, every day, on them, or that's how the pay agreements work out. So 84 hour weeks, and you're not paid for your off rotation.

3) This works to annual work of roughly 3500 hours. At $150k, assuming they're paid straight time (many do get overtime but I don't feel like doing the math), the hourly rate works out to $42 / hour, which is not that great (it's not terrible either).

Many do make more than $150k, however some are on elevated pay for hazard rate (subsea work, politically unstable areas, etc), and other have additional modifiers (hot bunking adds $250/day in some cases). Keep in mind as well that most of this work goes on in fairly horrible places (deserts, jungles, subsea), and they welders are spending weeks if not months away from not only their families, but often any communication to the outside world. The pay is there for a reason.

Note: On many vessels and offshore platforms there's extremely limited bandwidth for personal use, often just a 256k satellite connection of which at least half is used for operations. So that's 128k-256k between 16-40 people who can only use devices for 2-3 hours a day.

Ask away with further questions, I'm a corrosion and materials engineer who works in conjunction with a lot of welders and others on contract projects.

Maybe shop class should become robots and automation class.