Welder - Structural
Location
Kankakee, IL
Wage
$20/hr
Employment Type
Full-time
Required Skills & Certifications
Posted on October 27, 2026
Location
Kankakee, IL
Wage
$20/hr
Employment Type
Full-time
Posted on October 27, 2026
We are seeking a skilled and detail-oriented Structural Shop Welder to join our fabrication team. In this role, you will be responsible for welding, assembling, and fabricating structural metal components with precision and adherence to safety standards.
At roughly $20/hr, this posting comes in about 35% below the $31/hr median for welding jobs across Illinois, where the middle half runs $26–$41/hr across 184 postings with published pay. Put another way, it pays more than about 4% of the comparable postings we have wage data for. That gap is worth raising directly — in a market this size there is normally room to negotiate toward the median, particularly if you already hold the certifications the posting asks for.
Kankakee, IL is a small market in our index: 1 other active welding opening alongside this one, from 1 employer. Across Illinois as a whole we're tracking 242 other active welding openings from 145 employers. With this few local postings, most welders here end up either commuting or looking at travel work. Browse welding jobs across Illinois.
The most active employers in Illinois at the moment, by number of open welding reqs, are Gerber Collision & Glass (12), S&C Electric Company (9), and Crash Champions (9). Volume like that usually means either a genuine expansion or a staffing agency working several client sites — worth knowing which before you apply.
Within Illinois, the best-paying metros we track by median hourly rate are Chicago at $38/hr, Elk Grove Village at $34/hr, and Bedford Park at $30/hr. If you can relocate or commute, that spread is worth factoring in.
This posting calls for MIG. MIG (GMAW) feeds a continuous wire electrode through a shielding-gas nozzle. It lays down metal fast and is forgiving on clean material, which is why it dominates production and light fabrication work.
See all structural welder openings if you want to compare this against similar roles.
Pay figures are medians computed from live postings in the Welding Pros index, not from survey data, and they move as employers post. Welder - Structural figures were last recalculated when this page was built.