Skilled trades
What does a Plumber or Pipefitter do?
Installing and repairing the things buildings and equipment depend on, mostly on site and mostly with your hands.
What the day is like
- Tools, materials, your body.
- Right or wrong, to a standard.
- No two days alike.
- Answerable for your own work.
The facts
- Pay
- $63,800 a year, median
- Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters, May 2025
- Usually needs
- High school diploma or equivalent
- A year or two, often while earning something.
- Jobs
- +7% projected change in jobs, 2025-2035 projections
- Demand looks growing
What is good about it
- No two days are the same, if that is what you want from a week.
- You answer for your own work rather than for other people, which suits more people than admit it.
- You can see what you did at the end of the day.
What people find hard about it
- Dirty and awkward jobs
- Emergency call-outs
- Quoting for work people resent paying for
The unpleasant jobs are part of the job, not the exception.
Will machines take this job?
Hard for machines to take over. Physical work in changing spaces is the hardest kind for machines to take over; the paperwork around it is not.
How to find out whether it suits you
Shadow a plumber for a day, and fit one replacement part yourself under supervision.
Would this actually suit you?
CareerDNA works that out from what you choose rather than from what you say about yourself: two minutes of choosing between real jobs, a few puzzles, and some questions about what you are like. It is free, it saves as you go, and it will tell you plainly where the answer is thin.