Welder Salary in California
The median welding job in California currently posts at $35/hr — about $72,800/yr at full-time hours, based on 422 active listings with employer-posted wages. The specialty table below shows where the highest-paying disciplines cluster locally.
25th percentile
$28/hr
Entry-level / first-year welders
Median
$35/hr
≈ $72,800/yr full-time
75th percentile
$48/hr
Cert-stamped / specialty welders
Based on 422 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lead Welder | $58/hr | $120,640 | 13 |
| Pipefitter / Welder | $43/hr | $89,440 | 6 |
| Journeyman Welder | $39/hr | $81,120 | 5 |
| Pipe Welder | $38/hr | $79,040 | 13 |
| Manufacturing Welder | $38/hr | $79,040 | 5 |
| Structural Welder | $34/hr | $70,720 | 10 |
| Welder / Fabricator | $32/hr | $66,560 | 69 |
| TIG Welder | $28/hr | $58,240 | 52 |
| MIG Welder | $27/hr | $56,160 | 30 |
| Entry-Level Welder | $27/hr | $56,160 | 15 |
| Stick Welder | $25/hr | $52,000 | 9 |
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.