how much would a new welder make?

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as in fresh outta trade school with a bunch of certs, what would a new welder expect to make right off the bat? and i dont mean in a freakish rare situation where someone is lucky enough to make 20/hr or something, i mean realistically and generally, thanks for any info since im gonna be job searching in a year or 2 lol, just wondering what im in for, thanks yall for answers
Reply:Wages range all over the place according to where you live.  In the Vancouver area you can expect a difference of five dollars between working in the city and working in the upper Fraser Valley.  Your best bet is to go to your local library and get the librarian to help you look through the Stats Canada files.  You will find the average wage rates for all trades in all regions.   Much of the info you have to pay for unless you use the public library.
Reply:8 bucks an hour for a newbie welder.
Reply:Depends, If you are able to enter an apprenticeship with pipefitters or boilermakers you can start around 20 dollars an hour and get to around 70 with benefits as a journeyman.UA Local 598
Reply:lol.. library.. those are up to date..lol.... look in the want ads man... what better place to find out your local wage.. if it's national wages you're lookin for, go online and get a hot-sheet..if you're not livin on the edge, you're takin up too much room..
Reply:Originally Posted by ibanezed4yrslol.. library.. those are up to date..lol.... look in the want ads man... what better place to find out your local wage.. if it's national wages you're lookin for, go online and get a hot-sheet..
Reply:Fresh out of school won't pay very well unless you have some demonstrable & practical experience in the field.  School certs earned in a booth (with out rain, wind, dirt, grease etc...) are great on paper.  Find a job and put you nose to the grind stone and build up some experience.  then you can ask for $$ based on knowledge & experience.  Good luck
Reply:I dont think 20 would be a rare situation at all, im close to that and I havent even finished school yet.  Most guys I talk to who are leaving school with certs are at minimum $20/hrHave we all gone mad?
Reply:anywhere from 12-20/hr would be about standard.There's plenty of production fab shops that just want a trigger puller for Mig and will happily pay $8-12/hr for some newbie to do it.Grads coming out of my last school with 2 year degrees usually placed around 16-20/hr. times are a little slow so it's not uncommon for employers to try to push it and desperate people to take the work so they can pay down rigs etc. In college while getting my welding degree I made 12.50/hr working as a Mig/tig welder in a production shop.  It wasn't gravy work but it paid my dues and gave me some good experience to put on my resume.
Reply:strange they pay so little even if your certified with aws or cbw proving you know how to weld.. should be regulations
Reply:If you took a guy who welded on coupons for 5 years and a guy who welded in the field for 5 years, who do you think a company would hire? Unless it is a high volume production job, most companies want to hire a guy that can build things to print, the first time, without having to hold his hand. I had a hard time finding my first welding job, and from experience let me tell you, after about a month you realize how little your certs mean and how much your on the job work experience means. Take a **** job, learn from it, move on.
Reply:if you are not afraid to travel most companies are paying 20-28per hr and 50-100 per day perdeim
Reply:Originally Posted by TIGProIf you took a guy who welded on coupons for 5 years and a guy who welded in the field for 5 years, who do you think a company would hire? Unless it is a high volume production job, most companies want to hire a guy that can build things to print, the first time, without having to hold his hand. I had a hard time finding my first welding job, and from experience let me tell you, after about a month you realize how little your certs mean and how much your on the job work experience means. Take a **** job, learn from it, move on.
Reply:if you can get  on as a welder  helper  keep your eyes and ears open  ask  why are you  doing  it  this  way ??  you can  learn  lot;s  the older person you work  with  the  moor  you  can learn  to  do a loti work with a old man the first 2 or 3 days i did know aney one can be thathard to work with .  one  dayhe stop and told  me if you want to learn . i will show you .  watch just  11  mo later i had to  feld certf.  nad my owne helper and still  asking  quistons
Reply:Originally Posted by slcolvinif you can get  on as a welder  helper  keep your eyes and ears open  ask  why are you  doing  it  this  way ??  you can  learn  lot;s  the older person you work  with  the  moor  you  can learn  to  do a loti work with a old man the first 2 or 3 days i did know aney one can be thathard to work with .  one  dayhe stop and told  me if you want to learn . i will show you .  watch just  11  mo later i had to  feld certf.  nad my owne helper and still  asking  quistons
Reply:I think it means that this person found a mentor and gets frustrated at the keyboard.
Reply:Originally Posted by 99trxriderWTF does that say??
Reply:As others have said it does depend on your location so if your in the middle of podunk then $10 - $15 is average from my research while in a major industrial metro it can go from $12.50 - $25.  In my area the latter tends to be the case and if you know how to weld pipe as well as metal core and can weld vertical then your in and golden.  As for availability of jobs again it depends on the area, I've been looking back in two different states that I used to live in and nearby states and the work is very sparse while here I can apply to any number of ship yards that are hiring as well as a rail company; heavy equipment manufacturer; fab shops, construction companies; research facility; power plant company; and if the last hurdles are cleared a wind turbine manufacturer.
Reply:the local Army depot here starts out their welders at 21.00 per/hr ...climbs from there depending on skill level......
Reply:Originally Posted by sn0border88I dont think 20 would be a rare situation at all, im close to that and I havent even finished school yet.  Most guys I talk to who are leaving school with certs are at minimum $20/hr
Reply:Most of the kids around here, if not gainfully unemployed, land a job at some fabricating shop, and make minimum wage until they prove themselves.Be very careful about what you learn.  A guy that can make a nice bead does not a weldor make  Fitup is the key to all welding in most shops, and in the field.  You have to know how to fit the metal before you can weld it.Saddles, bevel cuts, compound angles, etc..................  Mess up a 12' piece of stock because of a bad cut, and ya got problems.Yeah sure, learn to weld, but learn to fit before you call yourself a welder.  Whole different ballgame."Any day above ground is a good day"http://www.farmersamm.com/
Reply:Somebody ought to just straight out tell all the kids going to welding schools those pieces of paper the schools call welding certs are little more than toilet paper.Certified weldor has become one of the most misunderstood pair of words on Earth lately since everybody from some association of car body repair salesman to AWS is passing them out.I can test for and have 10 certs today at 1 shop, and they are all worthless if I change shops tomorrow.
Reply:I worked wit a guy one time that was a Millright & had wrenched & welded at logging camps for years.  he could stick together rusty pieces of metal standing on his head in the mud.  Built all kinds of great jobs.  But he froze up in a booth when it was test time.  The shop would send him on tough field jobs as a "helper".  As a helper he made the shop lots of $$$
Reply:Originally Posted by BluesmanHe is saying he got assigned the helper to a hardass and didn't know anyone could be that difficult to work with.  One day the ol feller told him if he wanted to learn he would show him.  Apparantly he did and now he has his own helper.  BUT, he still asks questions and continues to learn daily...Dude is a lifelong learner, I can appreciate that as I am too.  I'm always trying to learn something new and broaden my skillset.
Reply:Originally Posted by Old FartSomebody ought to just straight out tell all the kids going to welding schools those pieces of paper the schools call welding certs are little more than toilet paper.Certified weldor has become one of the most misunderstood pair of words on Earth lately since everybody from some association of car body repair salesman to AWS is passing them out.I can test for and have 10 certs today at 1 shop, and they are all worthless if I change shops tomorrow.Originally Posted by snappy101im getting the certs at a college not a particular shop so their good everywhere, they do mean something though cuz their all tested by CWB or AWS wherever u might be,  but certs do mean something, means u got a proper footing and starting point, if i ran a shop i wouldnt trust a person that didnt have certs
Reply:A certificate is a note of introduction that says you have the ability to learn. Tell em you aint learned much and are keen for some harder learnin. That means your wages will be low cos your still learnin.1. Get yer foot in a door.2. Show em how good you can learn. Put up with the $h1t and deliver more than expected. Take responsibility, see the bigger picture and work on their side.3. Don't burn any bridges...you may well be comin back later and the grapevine has many secret passages. If you leave for any reason then say it's with regret and many thanks instead of the foreman is an a$$hole.4. Give it a year or two and other doors will be openin right there or elsewhere, and the foreman (or new foreman) may not be an a$$hole after all.So my pappy tole me.Last edited by AyAy; 03-01-2010 at 05:56 AM.Orion pulse-arc welderStick an O/A too
Reply:true to last 2 posts.. but i wouldnt let someone drive my car without a drivers license and i wouldnt let them weld for me without certs in the particular field, they could be missing key elements of what the certs cover whoo knows, and yes their just a beginning
Reply:Originally Posted by snappy101true to last 2 posts.. but i wouldnt let someone drive my car without a drivers license and i wouldnt let them weld for me without certs in the particular field, they could be missing key elements of what the certs cover whoo knows, and yes their just a beginning
Reply:Originally Posted by welderShaneTheir are alot of bad drivers out their even with their drivers license! As i said in one of my other posts in another thread. Where i work we had a guy fresh out of school with ''certs'' and didn't weld worth a sh!! and was actually fired due to bad work. Also their are many guys at my work that don't have any certs and they are some of the best welders i have seen. Im not saying this is about you at all, but don't come out of school with all these school "certs" and think you can weld everything just because you have a ''cert''.Best of luck to you,Shane
Reply:I think the question here is whether the new hire is taken on as a welder specific or meant to be a welder fabricator.  As Black Wolf states, the later requires good instincts, good mentors, and experience.  But a lot of jobs require only head-down, tail-up quality welds i.e.....when a ship comes into drydock and requires new deckplate the person with CWB wire goes to work at full wages.  Lots of stories of the the certified that can't weld.  What possibly happens is that they get their ticket but may not get a job for a couple of months.  They haven't had enough job time to  really have a good foothold on techniques and their weld quality has dropped.  New ticket people have to keep taking refreshers to keep their hand in.  I've been pressure welding a long time with lots of certs but still  run a few coupons at home whenever  I foresee a different procedure coming up.
Reply:wouldn't a welder right out of school make somewhere around 10 bucks an hour doing arc welding? or even maybe mig but it all depends on if your doing underwater welding. Or maybe working in a welding shop.
Reply:That all depends on where you are too. Here in the bay area if you are a certified welder (structural, not pipe) you should be at around $20 + or - a buck or two per hour starting. Thats a very mediocre wage here in CA, asme sect ix rig welders can make upwards of $60 per hour and more in some cases. I hear it not much different working in the petrochemical industry around the states (gulf coast tx, la, washington, etc) money wise either.
Reply:I think welding certs and drivers license is not a good comparison in this case.Look at it this way.I have worked in the automotive field for 25 years.In this time I have seen alot of automotive technicians come and go.I have seen guys that payed over $30,000 dollars tuition fees a year at institutes like NTI (Nascar Technical Institute).You can go there for less than 2 years and come out almost fully certified in Ford automotive training which is one of the toughest auto manufactuer programs to obtain certification.But on the other hand I have seen kids that have grown up working on cars with their dad or grandfather that have more mechanical knowledge than any of these trained guys, do to the fact that they have done hands on repair in a real world scenerio.They can come in and adapt pretty fast.The trained guys are usually lost for the first three months if they don't quit before then.They have never experienced any thing other than what they learned in a controlled environment of a classroom.I usually tell them "Toto I don't think you"re in Kansas anymore welcome to the real world."
Reply:I dont know how it is in the states. But here in Canada to get past the " production shop " stage and move onto the higher skilled areas of welding such as pressure work you have to become an apprentice, go through the levels of schooling, and sucessfully attain your inter-provincial red seal journymen status. Then you can move on to acquiring different certifications pertaining to the company your working under. Thats the big thing in canada to starting to move your career forward is having red seal status. You cant test for a pressure ticket unless you have that card, unless of course you were grandfathered in to the last part of the old system. But right out of highschool i was in a major production shop welding on structural members upwards of 40,000 pounds making 21$ an hour. It was all .062 mig welding and to be frank a year and a half of working there just about drove me insane, you almost become a robot and you hit a plateau where you stop improving. Then i got hired on as an apprentice with manitoba hydro and started moving around the provience on their rotation training schedule and was working at various steam plants, hydaulic dams, converter stations etc. They put me through school to get my red seal and now i have 4 different high pressure tickets pertaining to my job, and im making 120,000$ a year. Its not as much as some people in alberta of course, but iam set for life with this career, a very generous amount of benefits and an excellent pension. Its all about working your way up the ladder my friend, cant be president after your first day of work! just do everything you can to improve yourself and youll do just fine.Last edited by Pressure_Welder; 11-03-2010 at 10:42 AM.
Reply:Maybe in the beginning you shouldn't be too concerned about what you are making but for whom you are working and learning from. If you go union you will make more but will also be harder to break in depending on what area you are in. Your certs will never hurt you if you have the skill to back them up and apply it in the field. Next there is welding, where you burn rod or wire all day long and there is welding and fabbing, where you will be handed a print and told to put it together. If you can work from prints you already are above and entry level welder so if you can read and work from prints, get even better. Next you have a lot of competition out there right now with so many guys out of work and being years ahead of you. Find a shop with decent conditions, good people to work with and learn from and figure that into your wage, I am not saying to work dirt cheap or let someone take advantage of you , I am saying you might have to be patient for a while, if you don't move up in a realistic reasonable amount of time, move on."Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum"Lincoln Idealarc 250 AC/DCMillermatic 251   Syncrowave 300   30A spoolgunLincoln MP210Hypertherm 45(2) LN 25(2) Lincoln Weldanpower 225 CV(4) SA200   1 short hood    SA250    SAM 400
Reply:I got out of school a few months ago.. im making 12/ hr $ (started at 11 but got a raise recently)...there is only a few local welding related places within an under hour drive (like 5 places), and this is the only one that called back..The interview only asked a few questions about the previous, non welding job I had.. I weld the same thing day in , day out, its like a 6 foot long mig weld in a straight line that I make over and over and over again,and load big pc's of steel in a jig between that..My goal  is to get a job where I can do something different from time to time.This place is a factory production line..I would work for free if i can in a place that makes different stuff, and does different types of welding