Union Plumber Pay 2026:
UA Local-by-Local Scales
Updated 27 September 2026 | Every rate read off the named determination or wage sheet linked beside it
Each Local negotiates its own agreement with the signatory contractor association in its market and renews on a three to five year cycle. Some publish the resulting scale; many do not. Below are the 4 Locals whose in-force 2026 journeyman rate can be traced to a document you can open, which is a deliberately shorter list than the ones usually printed.
Highest package (UA Local 38)
$149.76
Lowest package listed
$103.28
Median journeyman wage
$80.81
Median employer contributions
$50.44
Section 01
2026 Journeyman Scale, as Published
Ordered by total straight-time package. Each row is a single published figure, not a range, because each comes from one in-force document rather than from an average across employers.
| UA Local | Coverage | Journeyman Wage | Total Package | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UA Local 38San Francisco, CA | San Francisco County | $94.00 | $149.76 | California DIR, Determination SFR-2026-2issued 22 Aug 2026, expires 30 Jun 2027 |
| UA Local 393San Jose, CA | Santa Clara and San Benito counties | $83.57 | $138.04 | California DIR, Determination STC-2026-2issued 22 Aug 2026, expires 30 Jun 2027 |
| UA Local 1New York City, NY | New York City five boroughs | $78.05 | $124.45 | NYC Comptroller, Labor Law 220 construction schedule1 Jul 2026 to 30 Jun 2027 |
| UA Local 130Chicago, IL | Chicago and suburbs | $62.00 | $103.28 | Plumbers Local 130 UA, PCA wage rate sheet, appendix C1 Jun 2026 to 31 May 2027 |
- Total package is the basic hourly wage plus the employer contributions itemised on the same document. It excludes overtime multipliers, premium pay, per-diem, and any payroll deduction taken from the member.
- Two of these are prevailing-wage determinations rather than the CBA itself. A determination is a government finding of the scale for public-works projects, derived from the named agreement, so it tracks union scale without being a payroll record.
- This is not a ranking of the highest-paying Locals in the country. It is the set whose scale is published and checkable. Locals in states with no prevailing-wage law and no public wage sheet are absent because their scale is not public, not because it is low.
Section 02
How to Read a UA Wage Sheet
The UA Local wage sheet is a one or two page document that summarises the in-force Collective Bargaining Agreement terms. It is the source of truth for what a union plumber gets paid in that Local's jurisdiction. The format varies between Locals, and so do the components: comparing two sheets line by line shows how much the composition differs even when the headline package looks similar.
| Component | Local 130 Chicago | Local 38 San Francisco | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic hourly wage | $62.00 | $94.00 | The journeyman scale. Everything below is paid on top of it. |
| Health and welfare | $18.15 | $24.66 | Pays family medical with no employee premium. Local 130 adds a separate $2.70 retiree welfare line. |
| Pension | $12.00 | $22.83 | Defined benefit. Credits are portable between Locals through UA reciprocity. |
| Pension, defined contribution | $6.00 | not itemised | Individual account alongside the DB pension. The California determination does not break this out separately. |
| Training | $2.17 | $4.30 | Funds the apprenticeship and journeyman upgrade training. Local 130's JAC line includes $0.10 to the UA International Training Fund. |
| Other funds | $0.26 | $3.97 | Industry and advancement funds. Local 130's is the Plumbing Council industry fund. |
| Vacation and holiday | no line | $0.00 | Neither document carries a funded vacation line, which is worth knowing if you have seen one quoted. |
| Total package | $103.28 | $149.76 | Wage plus employer contributions, straight time. |
The most commonly misunderstood line is health and welfare. Non-union workers often compare their base hourly wage to the union base hourly wage and conclude the union premium is modest. The full comparison requires adding the employer-paid health and welfare on the union side, which is $18.15 an hour on the Chicago sheet and $24.66 on the San Francisco determination, to the union base wage. A non-union worker paying a family health-insurance premium themselves is effectively losing that much per hour of take-home to cover what the fund covers with no employee contribution. The same dynamic applies to the pension lines, which are larger than most people expect: $18.00 an hour in Chicago once the defined-contribution line is included, and $22.83 in San Francisco.
Section 03
Geography: Where the Top Locals Cluster
UA Local pay tracks two structural geographies: dense commercial-construction markets (NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, DC, Seattle, San Jose) where the commercial union signatory contractor base is strong, and major industrial markets (Detroit auto, Milwaukee industrial, Pittsburgh steel and gas, Gulf Coast refineries) where the industrial pipefitter market sustains union density.
The dense commercial-market Locals pay the highest base wages because the project mix is large commercial buildings (office towers, hospitals, universities, hotels, multi-family residential at scale) where the labour cost premium is tolerable inside total project economics. That shows clearly in the published figures: San Francisco Local 38 at $94.00 and San Jose Local 393 at $83.57 sit well above Chicago Local 130 at $62.00, and the Bay Area packages clear $138.00 against Chicago's $103.28.
The industrial Locals pay somewhat lower base wages on commercial work but anchor their overall income through industrial pipefitter and steamfitter work where overtime is high. In markets like Detroit, where plumbers are organised under UA Local 98 and pipefitters under Local 636, a journeyman on an auto-plant installation can work well beyond a standard week during build-out periods, so gross annual income narrows the gap against the higher-base-wage commercial Locals. We have not sourced a published 2026 scale for those Locals, so no rate for them appears in the table above.
Beyond the Locals listed here are the second-tier metros (Denver, Minneapolis, Portland) and a long tail of smaller Locals in mid-size cities. Their scales exist but are not consistently published, which is why this page carries four rows rather than fifty. To find a specific Local and ask for its current wage sheet, use the UA Find a Local directory.
Section 04
Travel and Pension Portability
One of the underappreciated features of the UA Local system is that pension and health-and-welfare contributions are portable between Locals through reciprocity agreements. A journeyman who starts in Local 98 Detroit, works a few years out of Local 130 Chicago on a major project, then settles into Local 32 Seattle accumulates pension credits in the same UA national pension fund the entire time. Health-and-welfare contributions follow the worker through a national reciprocity bank that ensures continuous coverage.
The travel-card mechanism enables this portability. A Local-card holder who wants to work out of another Local's jurisdiction submits the card to the receiving Local's hiring hall. If the receiving Local has work available beyond what its own membership can fill, the traveler is dispatched and works at the receiving Local's wage and benefit scale. The contributions to H&W and pension are recorded to the traveler's home Local through reciprocity, ensuring the worker does not lose benefits accumulation during the travel.
Travel is structural to specific UA niches. UA Local 798 (cross-country pipeline) is fundamentally a travel Local: the work is wherever the pipeline is being built. UA Local 568 (Marathon refinery turnarounds) and other industrial-outage contractors pull travelers from across the country during outage windows. Beyond these specialty Locals, individual journeymen on commercial Locals travel on major-project basis: a Local 98 Detroit journeyman taking a six-month assignment in Phoenix during a semiconductor fab build-out, for example.
The portability is part of why UA careers can sustain long-arc earnings without geographic lock-in. A union plumber who started in 2005 in a depressed Detroit market and travelled to Chicago, then to Seattle during the tech-boom commercial wave, then settled into one of the Sun Belt Locals during the recent population-migration construction wave can string the highest-employment-density markets together without losing pension credits or benefits. The combination of strong CBA terms in any one market plus portability across markets is one of the structural reasons union plumber lifetime earnings exceed non-union by more than the spot-wage gap suggests.