Calibration technician salary: official BLS pay by percentile, state and industry

Calibration technicians in the US earned a median of $67,820 a year ($32.61 an hour) in May 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS, occupation code SOC 17-3028). The middle half earned between $56,380 and $92,080. Pay is highest in energy, aerospace and research, and in Washington, Oklahoma, Louisiana and California. This page breaks down the official figures; for the job itself, see our calibration technician guide and the careers hub.

Calibration technician pay at a glance

How much does a calibration technician make?

BLS publishes five points of the pay distribution for each occupation. For calibration technologists and technicians in May 2025:

The mean wage ($74,170) sits above the median because a minority of well-paid jobs pulls the average up. When you compare an offer, compare it with the median and the percentiles, not the mean. BLS turns hourly wages into annual ones by multiplying by 2,080 hours (40 hours × 52 weeks), whether or not people actually work that much (OEWS Technical Note).

Three things to know before you use these figures:

• They are base pay. OEWS wages are straight-time gross pay. They include base rate, cost-of-living allowances, hazardous-duty pay and production bonuses, but exclude overtime pay, shift differentials, nonproduction bonuses and benefits (OEWS Technical Note). A technician who works a lot of overtime earns more than the table shows.
• They count employees only. The 16,540 jobs are wage and salary jobs. The BLS Employment Projections count about 17,000 jobs because they also include the self-employed (1.2% of this occupation) and use a different method.
• They are a three-year blend. The May 2025 estimates combine survey responses collected from November 2022 to May 2025, with older wages adjusted to May 2025 (OEWS Technical Note). BLS publishes new estimates once a year, and warns that the three-year design makes them less useful for tracking changes over time (OEWS FAQ).

Which industries pay calibration technicians the most?

The industries that hire the most calibration technicians are not the ones that pay the most. Third-party testing laboratories (2,620 jobs), electronic and precision equipment repair shops (1,440) and instrument manufacturers (1,180) together employ about a third of the occupation, and all three have medians around $59,000 to $62,000. Technicians employed by natural gas pipelines, utilities, aerospace manufacturers and research and development labs have medians from about $86,000 to $103,000.

At the broadest level, the medians were $73,760 in manufacturing (5,950 jobs) and $61,800 in professional, scientific and technical services, which includes testing labs (4,280 jobs). BLS publishes industry data only for the nation as a whole, not by state (OEWS FAQ). Some small industries show very high medians, for example educational services, but with only about 150 jobs and a large sampling error; we left them out of the chart.

Calibration technician salary by state

BLS published calibration technician wages for 36 states and Puerto Rico in May 2025. Texas stands apart: its 5,020 jobs are about 30% of the national total, more than three times its share of all employment (location quotient 3.36). Washington had the highest median.

How to read the state figures:

• Missing states are not zero. BLS released no calibration technician estimate at all for Alabama, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming. For Alaska, Arkansas and Kansas it released employment but not wages, and for Illinois wages but not employment. BLS withholds estimates for confidentiality or quality reasons; the occupation still exists there.
• Small states are less precise. BLS publishes a relative standard error with each estimate. For calibration technicians it ranges from about 5% to over 40% for state employment (Oregon and Utah are above 45%), so treat small differences between states as noise.
• No cost-of-living adjustment. A higher median in an expensive metro area does not mean more purchasing power.

Metro areas with the most calibration jobs and the highest pay

Houston has more calibration technicians than any state except Texas itself, and the Gulf Coast refining and chemical areas (Beaumont–Port Arthur, Baton Rouge) combine a high concentration of jobs with high pay.

BLS published estimates for 86 metro and nonmetropolitan areas; the full list is in the BLS occupation profile linked in the sources.

What the BLS numbers don’t show

The official figures are the best public data on calibration pay, but they answer only part of what people ask on forums.

• Lab vs field. BLS counts lab and field technicians as one occupation. Some technicians on forums report that field service pays more, largely through per diem and overtime, and that lab technicians move to the field for the money. The industry data give a hint: repair and service companies pay below the median, while in-house jobs at energy and aerospace sites pay above it.
• Overtime. Because OEWS leaves out overtime premiums, jobs with regular overtime (plant shutdowns, field service, some union contracts) earn more than the published wage.
• Discipline. BLS does not split the occupation by discipline. One experienced technician on a forum reported that electronics work pays more than mechanical calibration, and that nuclear sites pay more; we have no official data to confirm it.
• Certification. BLS does not record certifications, and we found no public, independent study of what the ASQ Certified Calibration Technician adds to pay.
• Experience. BLS does not publish pay by years of experience. Pages that show “entry level” or “senior” calibration salaries use their own data, not BLS’s.

Calibration technician I, II, III, IV: what the levels mean

There is no national ladder of calibration technician levels. Titles such as Calibration Technician I, II, III or IV, or Cal Tech A, B and C, are each employer’s own job grades, and what a “III” does or earns in one company says little about another. BLS reports one occupation with no levels.

The one official, public grading scheme is the federal government’s. Federal trades jobs that test, maintain, repair and calibrate electronic test, measurement and diagnostic equipment are classified in the Federal Wage System series 2602, Electronic Measurement Equipment Mechanic (design and engineering-type work on such equipment belongs to other series). The Office of Personnel Management standard (2009) describes three grades:

Each federal wage grade has a range of pay rates on a local area wage schedule (OPM, Introduction to the FWS Job Grading System), so the same grade pays differently from one area to another. If you are comparing a private-sector “level IV” with a federal job, compare the duties, not the number.

How calibration pay compares with similar jobs

BLS says calibration technicians typically need an associate degree (OOH). Their median is somewhat below the related engineering technician and electronics repairer occupations ($73,900 to $78,190), close to other precision instrument repairers and above medical equipment repairers and inspectors and testers.

The biggest jumps in pay come from moving into engineering work. See metrology engineer for that path, and the career path section of our technician guide for the usual steps in between.

Metrology technician, metrologist and metrology engineer pay

Job ads use many titles for measurement work. Pay data exist only for official occupations, so the question is which occupation a title belongs to:

How to read it:

• Only the 17-3028 figures are calibration technician pay. The SOC defines 17-3028 as calibrating measurement devices by applying measurement science, so a metrology technician job that is mainly calibration belongs there. If a job with that title is mostly measuring parts rather than calibrating instruments, read the duties: our technician guide explains how the titles overlap.
• O*NET’s title index also links “metrology technician” to two electronics repair occupations (49-2094, commercial and industrial equipment, and 49-2093, transportation equipment), from occupational code assignments rather than from the SOC itself. Those are different occupations, and their pay is not metrology pay.
• The engineer medians describe engineers in general. “Engineers, all other” and “industrial engineers” are large groups (about 154,000 and 366,000 jobs) in which metrologists are a small minority. There is no official pay figure for metrology engineers on their own. Our metrology engineer page covers that role.

Calibration technician salary in the UK

The UK statistics office classifies “technician, calibration” in SOC 2020 unit group 5224, precision instrument makers and repairers (ONS coding index), which also includes instrument makers. In the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2026 (provisional, released October 22, 2026), full-time employees in this group earned:

Annual figures cover only employees who had been in the same job for more than a year; the annual median is rounded from £39,892.50. ONS rates it as “acceptable” quality (coefficient of variation 11%) and suppresses the 10th and the 70th to 90th percentiles of this group as unreliable (coefficient of variation above 20%). For comparison, the median for all full-time employees was £40,911. ONS does not publish a figure for calibration technicians alone.