Plumber Salary in Illinois: Pay by Experience, City & Take-Home

A plumber in Illinois earns a median of $99,950 a year, or about $48.05 an hour, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025). Most of the trade lands between $50,250 at the 10th percentile and $126,430 at the 90th. That median sits roughly $36,150 above the national plumber median of $63,800, which makes Illinois one of the stronger states in the country for this trade.

How Illinois compares to the national plumber wage

The gap is big and it’s real. Illinois plumbers earn a median of $99,950, while the national median for the trade is $63,800, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025). That’s a difference of $36,150 a year, or about 57 percent more than the typical American plumber takes home. Put another way, a mid-career plumber in Illinois earns roughly half again what the trade pays nationally.

The state mean comes in at $93,400, a touch below the $99,950 median. When the mean sits under the median, it usually tells you the lower end of the wage curve is pulling the average down rather than a handful of very high earners pulling it up. For a searcher, the median is the honest middle: half of Illinois plumbers earn more than $99,950 and half earn less.

Why is Illinois so far ahead? Two forces do most of the work. First, Chicago is a dense union town with a long history of organized building trades, and the metro alone employs the bulk of the state’s plumbers. Second, demand for skilled licensed labor in and around a major city keeps wages high. The state employs about 16,750 plumbers in total, and the floor for the trade, the 10th percentile, already sits at $50,250, which is not far off the national median. In other words, even a newer Illinois plumber earns close to what a typical plumber earns across the country.

Plumber pay in Illinois by experience

Experience moves this number more than almost any other factor. A first-year apprentice and a master plumber running their own crews are both counted in the BLS data, and the spread between them is wide. The table below maps the percentile points from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025) to typical career stages.

Read the jumps, because they tell the career story. Going from the 10th to the 25th percentile adds $21,820, the single biggest step on the ladder. That climb usually maps to finishing an apprenticeship and moving from helper rates to journeyman rates. Once you reach journeyman territory, the gains keep coming: the move from the 25th to the 50th percentile is worth another $27,880, the largest dollar jump in the whole table.

The top half of the curve flattens. From the median to the 75th percentile you pick up $20,100, and from the 75th to the 90th only $6,380 more. That tight gap at the top, from $120,050 to $126,430, is a familiar pattern in the trades: hourly journeyman pay tops out, and the way past it is a different role, not another raise. Plumbers who push beyond $126,430 usually get there by earning a master license, supervising crews, taking on commercial or industrial contracts, or running their own shop, where income stops looking like an hourly wage at all.

It helps to translate those annual figures into hourly terms, since plumbers think in rates. The entry rate of about $24.16 an hour roughly doubles to the senior rate of $60.78 across a full career. The median of $48.05 is the number most working journeymen will recognize as their own. Notice that the move from median to experienced, $48.05 to $57.72 an hour, is worth nearly $10 on the clock, while the final step to senior adds only about $3 more. The dollars at the top come from hours, complexity, and overtime, not from a higher base rate alone.

One more thing the percentiles reveal: the distance between the 25th and 75th percentile, from $72,070 to $120,050, is $47,980. That’s the working core of the trade, the band where most licensed Illinois plumbers actually sit. If you’re inside it, you’re earning a normal, healthy wage for the work. If you’re below $72,070, you’re likely still early or still apprenticing, and the data says the path up is well worn.

For anyone planning a career, the lesson is plain. The fastest, most reliable pay growth happens in the first several years as you move from apprentice toward licensed journeyman. After that, raw hourly rate gains slow, and the next leg up comes from specialization, licensing, or ownership.

Plumber salary by Illinois metro

Where you work inside Illinois matters almost as much as how long you’ve worked. Chicago dominates both pay and headcount, but the downstate metros are no slouch. Here are the five largest Illinois metro areas for plumbers, ranked by employment, with median pay from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025).

Chicago is the clear leader at $103,380, which is $3,430 above the statewide median and the highest pay in the table. It also concentrates the work: 12,750 of the state’s 16,750 plumbers, roughly three out of four, work in the Chicago metro. If you want the most jobs and the highest median pay in one place, that’s where both sit.

The downstate metros cluster tightly in the mid-$90,000s. Champaign-Urbana leads that group at $95,530, with Springfield at $94,370 and Rockford at $94,230 close behind. The spread among those three is only about $1,300, so for most downstate plumbers the choice of city is less about base pay and more about cost of living and which contractors are hiring. Peoria sits lowest at $85,090, about $18,290 under Chicago and roughly $14,860 below the state median.

Headcount outside Chicago is thin, and that’s worth planning around. Peoria leads the downstate metros for jobs at 560 plumbers, followed by Rockford at 440, Champaign-Urbana at 390, and Springfield at 220. Add those four together and you get about 1,610 plumbers, barely an eighth of Chicago’s 12,750. Fewer positions means fewer employers competing for you, which can cap raises and limit how often you can switch shops to bump your pay. In Chicago, the sheer density of contractors gives a licensed journeyman more bargaining power to negotiate.

There’s also a curiosity in the numbers. Peoria pays the lowest median, $85,090, yet employs the most plumbers downstate. Champaign-Urbana pays $10,440 more at $95,530 but employs fewer. That tells you pay downstate tracks local construction demand and the local contractor mix more than headcount. If you’re picking a downstate metro purely on pay, Champaign-Urbana, Springfield, and Rockford all clear $94,000, while Peoria trails the group.

The practical read: Chicago pays a real premium, but it also carries a higher cost of living, especially housing. A $103,380 median in Chicago and a $94,230 median in Rockford are not as far apart as they look once rent and property taxes enter the picture. We get into that math in the take-home section.

Take-home pay after taxes in Illinois

Gross pay is the headline. Take-home is what lands in your account. Illinois levies a flat state income tax, so the share that leaves your check is steadier across income levels than it would be in a state with brackets. The table below breaks down each percentile point from DATA, showing federal income tax, FICA (Social Security and Medicare), Illinois state tax, and what’s left, for tax year 2026.

At the median, an Illinois plumber grossing $99,950 keeps $73,753 after federal, FICA, and state tax, which is about $6,146 a month. The effective tax rate at that level is 26.2 percent. The entry-level plumber at $50,250 keeps $39,927, an effective rate of 20.5 percent, while the senior plumber at $126,430 nets $90,910 at a 28.1 percent rate. The rate creeps up as income rises, but Illinois’s flat state tax keeps the climb gentler than in a bracketed state.

Here’s the comparison that no AI overview will hand you. Take that same $99,950 median and earn it in Texas instead. Texas has no state income tax, so the Texas plumber nets $78,701 against the Illinois plumber’s $73,753. That’s a gap of $4,948 a year, money that goes straight to Springfield in the form of Illinois income tax. Over a decade, that’s nearly $50,000 in pre-investment dollars.

Look at how the components move as income rises. At the entry level, federal tax is just $3,992 and FICA is $3,844, nearly a match. By the median, federal tax has jumped to $13,603 while FICA is $7,646, so federal income tax overtakes payroll tax as the biggest single bite. The Illinois state line stays modest the whole way, $2,487 at entry, $4,948 at the median, $6,258 at the top, because the flat rate doesn’t accelerate the way federal brackets do. That flat structure is why the effective rate only climbs from 20.5 percent to 28.1 percent across the entire wage range, a narrower spread than you’d see in a heavily bracketed state.

The monthly figures are what most people budget against. Entry nets $3,327 a month, the median nets $6,146, the experienced plumber nets $7,239, and the senior plumber nets $7,576. The gap between median and senior monthly take-home is $1,430, which is the real-world reward for climbing from the middle of the trade to the top of it.

Before you book a moving truck, run the other half of the equation. Net pay minus local housing is the number that actually matters. The $4,948 Illinois costs you in income tax can be wiped out, or reversed, by differences in rent, property tax, and daily costs between two cities. A plumber netting $73,753 in Rockford with low housing costs can end the month with more in hand than one netting $78,701 in a high-rent Texas metro. Always compare take-home after housing, not gross, and not even net by itself.

To see your own number with your real filing status, deductions, and city, run it through the Illinois paycheck calculator. When tax season comes, software like TurboTax can handle the multi-state and self-employment cases that hit plumbers who do side work or run their own crews.

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How to earn more as a plumber in Illinois

The pay curve above shows where the money is. Here’s how to move up it, using levers that actually work in this state.

• Finish the apprenticeship and get licensed. The biggest single jump in the data, $21,820 from the 10th to the 25th percentile, comes from moving past helper status. In Illinois, plumbing is a licensed trade, and completing a registered apprenticeship to reach journeyman status is the clearest path off the bottom rung.
• Chase the master license. The top of the hourly curve flattens around $126,430. The plumbers who clear that ceiling are usually master-licensed, which opens supervisory roles, permitting authority, and the ability to bid and run jobs in your own name.
• Work in or near Chicago. The Chicago metro median of $103,380 is the highest in the state and sits $3,430 above the statewide median. If you can absorb the cost of living, that’s where the highest pay and the most jobs both are.
• Specialize in commercial, industrial, or service work. Backflow certification, medical gas piping, and large commercial systems command rates that push toward the 75th percentile ($120,050) and above. General residential repair sits lower on the curve.
• Move toward running the business. Once you’re at the 90th percentile of $126,430, more income comes from owning the shop, not clocking more hours. Estimating, bidding, and crew management are the skills that matter here.
• Build the business side. Courses in project estimating, small-business finance, and HVAC or backflow cross-training through a provider like Coursera can round out the trade skills with the management knowledge that separates a journeyman from an owner.

Job outlook for plumbers in Illinois

The headcount tells a stable story. Illinois employs about 16,750 plumbers, with roughly 12,750 of them, about 76 percent, working in the Chicago metro, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025). Plumbing is a licensed trade with steady demand tied to construction, renovation, and the simple fact that water systems in older Midwestern housing stock always need maintenance and replacement. That floor of demand keeps the trade resilient even when new construction slows.

The wage floor backs this up. At $50,250, even the 10th percentile in Illinois sits well above the national plumber median of $63,800’s poorer cousins in low-wage states, and the median of $99,950 reflects a market that pays skilled licensed labor well. For anyone weighing the trade, the combination of a high median, a strong wage floor, and concentrated demand in a major metro is about as solid as the building trades get. To see who’s hiring right now across Illinois metros, a board like ZipRecruiter lists current openings by city and pay range.

Related and higher-paying trades in Illinois

Plumbing sits in a tight cluster with the other licensed building trades in Illinois. Here’s how the closest comparisons stack up against the plumber median of $99,950, using median pay from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025).

An electrician in Illinois earns a median of $99,560, which is $390 less than a plumber in the state. The two trades are essentially neck and neck here, so the choice between them comes down to interest and local demand rather than pay. An HVAC technician in Illinois earns a median of $77,410, which is $22,540 less than a plumber. That’s a meaningful gap, and it’s one reason many HVAC techs cross-train into plumbing or hold both licenses to lift their earnings.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS 2025 (occupation 47-2152); ThePayGuide tax modeling for tax year 2026. Last updated 2026. See our methodology.