Welder Salary in California
The median welding job in California currently posts at $31/hr — about $64,480/yr at full-time hours, based on 306 active listings with employer-posted wages. The specialty table below shows where the highest-paying disciplines cluster locally.
25th percentile
$26/hr
Entry-level / first-year welders
Median
$31/hr
≈ $64,480/yr full-time
75th percentile
$38/hr
Cert-stamped / specialty welders
Based on 306 active welding jobs in California with employer-posted wages, normalized to hourly rate.
Median pay by specialty in California
Highest-paying welding disciplines in California, based on employer-posted wages.
| Specialty | Median hourly | ~Annual | Sample |
|---|---|---|---|
| Structural Welder | $60/hr | $124,800 | 12 |
| Manufacturing Welder | $48/hr | $99,840 | 5 |
| Construction Welder | $37/hr | $76,960 | 7 |
| Stick Welder | $35/hr | $72,800 | 18 |
| Flux-Core Welder | $35/hr | $72,800 | 13 |
| Pipe Welder | $31/hr | $64,480 | 35 |
| Pipefitter / Welder | $31/hr | $64,480 | 11 |
| Welder / Fabricator | $30/hr | $62,400 | 57 |
| TIG Welder | $28/hr | $58,240 | 63 |
| Shipyard Welder | $28/hr | $58,240 | 7 |
| MIG Welder | $27/hr | $56,160 | 35 |
| Lead Welder | $27/hr | $56,160 | 8 |
| Welder Helper | $24/hr | $49,920 | 6 |
| Entry-Level Welder | $24/hr | $49,920 | 19 |
| Spot Welder | $22/hr | $45,760 | 7 |
How we calculate this
Numbers come straight from the wages employers post on their own job ads — not government surveys, not self-reported salaries. Every listing we ingest from Indeed, Adzuna, USAJobs, Jooble, and the company career pages we crawl gets parsed for a posted wage, normalized to hourly rate (so a $52,000/yr posting becomes $25/hr, a $1,000/wk gig becomes $25/hr), and then aggregated.
We exclude listings without an explicit wage, listings that look like garbage data (e.g. $1.50/hr or $400/hr), and any scope with fewer than 5 wage-tagged matches. The numbers update daily as new jobs come in and stale listings expire.