Research study
What garage door labor actually costs, metro by metro
No federal wage series exists for garage door installers. Industry payroll data by county shows a bigger spread than most quotes admit.
Written by HyreGarage Research Desk Primary-source research and data analysis
Audited by HyreGarage Research Desk Query reproducibility and retrieval-date audit
The finding
Garage door labor pay roughly doubles from the cheapest big metro to the priciest.
Federal payroll data (BLS QCEW, 2025) for the industry that includes garage door installation, NAICS 238350, shows Middlesex County, Massachusetts averaging $104,943 per worker.
Miami-Dade County, Florida averages $51,576, a ratio of 2.03. That is a payroll average, not an installer’s wage.
What did we find?
No federal wage series exists for "garage door installer", and the closest tables were blocked. Every OEWS (the federal wage-by-job survey) web address we requested returned HTTP 403 (access blocked).
A second federal dataset, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), did answer. NAICS 238350, "Finish Carpentry Contractors", is the federal industry code whose listed examples include "garage door, residential-type, installation."
The metro spread is much wider than any national number shows. Across the 12 U.S. counties with the biggest workforce in this industry (2025 QCEW annual averages), Middlesex County, Massachusetts averages $104,943 per worker. Miami-Dade County, Florida averages $51,576. That is a ratio of 2.03.
By state, Maryland at $90,860 against West Virginia at $50,041 is a ratio of 1.82.
General cost of living does not predict the top of that range. BEA ranks California the most expensive state at 110.7. Yet its finish-carpentry pay of $71,024 sits below five states and the District of Columbia.
QCEW pay is a payroll average, not an installer’s take-home wage. Sales, office and owner wages are inside it.
What does this page measure, and what does it not?
A number that looks this precise needs its limits stated before you use it.
No federal job code covers only this work. Everything here is measured at the industry level: NAICS 238350, Finish Carpentry Contractors. That industry covers garage door installation along with cabinets, trim, millwork, windows and paneling.
"Average annual pay" is total wages paid by businesses in the industry, divided by average employment. It includes installers, but also sales staff, office staff, and owners who pay themselves wages. It is not the hourly rate you would be quoted for one installer.
BLS publishes carpenter and construction-trade wages by job through OEWS. Every OEWS address we requested from bls.gov, including the plain HTML tables, returned HTTP 403 on the retrieval date. This page exists because a second BLS program, QCEW, answered.
We picked the 12 U.S. counties with the largest workforce in NAICS 238350. That compares real, sizable local job markets, not a few firms whose average could swing on one payroll. A small county with two businesses is left out for that reason.
We report 2025 annual averages only. QCEW publishes a full history, but we did not compute a trend. One year answers the metro comparison this page asks about. A trend is a different page.
RPP covers all consumer goods and services and leans heavily on rents. We use it only as an outside check on whether "expensive place to live" explains the pay gap. It is not construction data.
Why did one federal dataset answer and the other not?
They are separate BLS programs on different servers. OEWS (Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics) is the survey that answers "what does a carpenter earn in this metro" by combining industry and job. Its tables live under bls.gov.
On the retrieval date, every OEWS page we requested came back HTTP 403. That included the national industry tables, the metro tables, and even the plain HTML landing pages for each release.
QCEW (Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages) is a different survey. It is built from state unemployment insurance records, not a sample. Its public CSV feed is served from data.bls.gov, not from the file tree that blocked us.
We requested the 2025 annual file for NAICS code 23835. (QCEW file names drop the last zero of the six-digit code.) It returned a complete CSV of 2,297 rows: the nation, all 51 state-level areas, and every county with publishable employment in the industry.
HyreGarage analysis: here is what this swap gains and what it costs. QCEW counts nearly every covered job, so for a headcount-and-payroll question it is arguably the stronger dataset. But it does not split jobs within an industry the way OEWS does.
QCEW cannot tell you what a garage door installer earns apart from the receptionist at the same carpentry contractor. It can tell you exactly what the whole industry workforce is paid, county by county.
For a page showing that location changes labor cost, that is enough, as long as we say exactly what is being measured at every step.
Is the industry match right? NAICS 238350 is titled "Finish Carpentry Contractors." We checked its listed examples against the joint U.S./Canada/Mexico NAICS manual via the Statistics Canada mirror, because census.gov’s own NAICS lookup also returned HTTP 403.
Garage door installation is one of about thirty named activities. Others include built-in cabinets, trim and molding, countertops, paneling, and door and window frames.
It is the right code for an installer who also does other finish carpentry, which describes much of the trade. It does not separate garage doors from everything else these contractors do.
Which metros pay garage door labor the most?
The Boston area’s Middlesex County tops the list; Miami-Dade is lowest. Every county below had at least 300 average employees in NAICS 238350 in 2025, a real local job market. Ranked by average annual pay per worker.
| County | Metro area | Avg. annual pay | Avg. weekly wage | Employment | Establishments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Middlesex County, MA | Boston metro (western suburbs) | $104,943 | $2,018 | 1,613 | 248 |
| Denver County, CO | Denver | $100,775 | $1,938 | 886 | 78 |
| King County, WA | Seattle | $82,716 | $1,591 | 2,100 | 212 |
| Suffolk County, NY | New York (Long Island) | $77,690 | $1,494 | 2,003 | 530 |
| Cook County, IL | Chicago | $75,808 | $1,458 | 2,020 | 452 |
| Clark County, NV | Las Vegas | $74,394 | $1,431 | 2,192 | 161 |
| Maricopa County, AZ | Phoenix | $70,492 | $1,356 | 4,448 | 468 |
| Harris County, TX | Houston | $69,296 | $1,333 | 1,598 | 190 |
| Broward County, FL | Fort Lauderdale | $62,449 | $1,201 | 1,759 | 385 |
| Salt Lake County, UT | Salt Lake City | $60,706 | $1,167 | 1,254 | 241 |
| Lee County, FL | Fort Myers–Cape Coral | $55,398 | $1,065 | 1,528 | 347 |
| Miami-Dade County, FL | Miami | $51,576 | $992 | 1,613 | 483 |
BLS QCEW, NAICS 238350, private ownership (own_code 5), 2025 annual averages, retrieved 2026-09-06. "Avg. annual pay" is total industry wages divided by average county employment: a payroll average across every role, not an installer wage. These are the 12 largest counties by average employment; smaller counties with published data are not shown.
Which states pay the most and least?
Maryland pays most and West Virginia least. All 51 areas are in the QCEW file. We show the extremes, because a middle row rarely changes a decision.
| State | Avg. annual pay | Avg. weekly wage | Employment | Establishments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maryland | $90,860 | $1,747 | 2,777 | 436 |
| Massachusetts | $87,683 | $1,686 | 5,016 | 1,299 |
| District of Columbia | $84,879 | $1,632 | 178 | 22 |
| New Jersey | $77,665 | $1,494 | 4,224 | 780 |
| Hawaii | $77,362 | $1,488 | 610 | 132 |
| Rhode Island | $76,461 | $1,470 | 761 | 161 |
| … 39 areas in between | ||||
| West Virginia | $50,041 | $962 | 234 | 69 |
| Idaho | $51,590 | $992 | 1,723 | 441 |
| Arkansas | $52,568 | $1,011 | 1,039 | 201 |
| Mississippi | $52,777 | $1,015 | 494 | 156 |
| Alabama | $53,920 | $1,037 | 929 | 250 |
| Montana | $54,545 | $1,049 | 616 | 263 |
BLS QCEW, NAICS 238350, private ownership, 2025 annual averages, retrieved 2026-09-06. National average annual pay: $67,302, on 158,288 average employment across 32,462 businesses. Puerto Rico and outlying areas are left out of the ranking; their figures are far lower and reflect a different market.
Does cost of living explain the pay gap? Partly.
Cost of living explains the low end of garage door installer pay better than the high end. The obvious guess is that this trade pays more where everything costs more. BEA’s Regional Price Parities (RPP) let us test that. They measure the general price level (rents, goods and services) with no construction input at all.
BEA’s 2024 RPPs, released February 19, 2026, rank California highest at 110.7, then Hawaii at 110.0, the District of Columbia at 109.9 and New Jersey at 108.8. At the bottom: Arkansas at 86.9, Mississippi at 87.0, and Iowa and Oklahoma tied at 87.8.
HyreGarage analysis: compare those with our finish-carpentry pay figures. Mississippi ($52,777) and Arkansas ($52,568) sit near the bottom of both lists. They are cheap to live in, and this trade pays to match.
But California, the most expensive state on BEA’s measure, pays this industry $71,024 on average. That is well below Maryland, Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, New Jersey, Hawaii and Rhode Island. None of those lead the RPP ranking.
New Jersey and Hawaii partly fit: both have high RPPs (108.8 and 110.0) and high finish-carpentry pay ($77,665 and $77,362). But Maryland and Massachusetts, this trade’s two top payers, are not among BEA’s four highest-RPP states.
So a general cost-of-living index is a fair floor and a poor ceiling for this trade. Something else drives the high end more than prices do. Candidates include state licensing rules, union membership in the trades, the age and density of local housing, and local competition.
We have not worked out which. Two numbers side by side cannot tell us. For how licensing varies by state, see our garage door installer licensing study.
How do you use this when comparing quotes?
Labor is the part of a garage door job that really changes with where you live. Materials mostly do not. Keep the job scope the same, and the difference that remains tells you something.
If you are not in one of the 12 listed counties, your state’s row is the better guide. QCEW has county data for smaller counties too, and you can pull it with the method in step 5.
High average pay in your area is a reason to expect a higher labor line on a quote. It is not a figure to hold a contractor to. Materials for a similar door should cost about the same nationwide; see our garage door price index study.
A quote that lists materials and labor separately lets you check the labor line against local pay. A quote that lumps them together cannot be checked against this data or any other. Our quote checker helps you spot what is missing.
This is an industry payroll average, not a wage survey of individual technicians. It shows whether your metro sits above or below the national pattern. It does not say what any one installer should earn.
Open data.bls.gov/cew/data/api/2025/a/industry/23835.csv, filter to your county’s area_fips and own_code 5, and read avg_annual_pay. The file is public and needs no key.
What do these terms mean?
- QCEW
- Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages: a near-complete count of covered jobs, built from state unemployment insurance records and published by BLS by industry for counties, states and the nation. The source of every pay figure here.
- OEWS
- Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics: the BLS survey of wages by job, within industry and by metro. Not used here, because every OEWS address we requested from bls.gov returned HTTP 403 on the retrieval date.
- NAICS 238350
- "Finish Carpentry Contractors": the federal industry code whose listed examples include home garage door installation, along with cabinets, trim, millwork, and window and door frames. Not garage-door-only.
- Average annual pay
- QCEW’s measure: total wages paid by an industry’s businesses divided by its average employment, for one area and year. A payroll average across every role, not a wage for one job.
- Regional Price Parity (RPP)
- A BEA measure of a state’s or metro’s price level compared with the national average (100), across all consumer goods and services. General cost of living, not building costs. Used here only as a cross-check.
- Own_code 5
- QCEW’s code for private-sector businesses. Used throughout this page to leave out the small amount of government employment coded to this industry.
What could we not find?
A wage for the job itself. This is the central gap. OEWS would let us report what a carpenter or construction laborer earns, by metro. It was blocked, and no HyreGarage estimate of an installer’s wage appears on this page.
Any garage-door-only figure. NAICS 238350 covers finish carpentry broadly. We did not try to assign a share of its payroll to garage door work. There is no published basis for that split. Inventing one would produce a number that looked garage-door-specific and was not.
A trend over time. We report 2025 annual averages only. QCEW’s full history would let a future page show whether the metro gap is growing or shrinking. That is a separate question.
The full tables for all 51 areas and every county. We print the top and bottom six states and the 12 largest counties. The full file is public, and the query takes one request. We cut nothing from the data itself, only from what is printed here.
Why Massachusetts and Maryland pay more than California. General cost of living does not predict the top of this range. We named likely factors (licensing, union membership, housing stock, local competition) but lack the data to choose between them. That is a follow-up study, not a paragraph here.
Questions
How much does a garage door installer earn?
Does garage door installation cost more in some cities?
Why is there no BLS wage data for garage door installers?
What is NAICS 238350?
Which state pays garage door and finish carpentry workers the most?
Does cost of living explain why some states pay more?
Is QCEW payroll data the same as OEWS wage data?
Which counties pay garage door and finish carpentry workers the most?
Can I look up my own county?
Will garage door installation cost more in an expensive city?
Written and audited by
HyreGarage Research Desk
Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking
We are not a garage door company. We read the agency file, the code record, the standards document or the public register ourselves, compute the figure from it, and publish it with the source and the date we retrieved it.
Where a number cannot be traced to a primary source, we publish the shorter page and say what we could not verify. Our own company records cover ten states; nothing national is ever derived from them.
- 10
- states our own company records cover — and the limit of any claim made from them
- 3,901
- garage door companies in the store
- 457
- license records verified against a state board
- 0
- national claims made from a ten-state store
How this desk works
- Primary sources only. Injury counts come from CPSC. Housing counts come from the Census file, not from a summary of it. Code history comes from the building commission that adopted the code. We do not cite an article that cites a source; we retrieve the source and do the arithmetic ourselves.
- Every figure carries its retrieval date. Registers change, datasets are revised and codes are amended. A number without the date it was read cannot be checked, so every study states one.
- Fact, calculation and analysis are labeled apart. A quote is a quote, a HyreGarage computation says so, and an interpretation says “HyreGarage analysis”. Presenting our reading of a dataset as something the agency stated would be the easiest way to lose the only thing this desk is for.
- Limitations go above the fold. If a figure is an upper bound, a bracket, or an association rather than a cause, that is said before the figure is quoted rather than in a footnote underneath it.
- No DIY instructions for spring, cable or track work. Those components hold enough stored energy to cause serious injury, and CPSC records the consequences. We describe what has failed and what a competent repair involves; we do not tell you how to do it.
Data as of BLS QCEW NAICS 238350 and BEA Regional Price Parities, retrieved 2026-09-06. Authorship on this site is organizational: the analysis belongs to the desk rather than to a named individual, and we do not publish credentials we do not hold.
Our editorial policy sets out how we source, date and correct what we publish.
Sources & retrieval dates
Comparing quotes from more than one company?
Ask each one to list labor and materials separately. That is the only way a local labor pattern like this one can tell you anything about your own quote.
HyreGarage is not a garage door company and does not perform, supervise or warrant garage door work. This page reports federal industry payroll data, not a wage survey of individual installers, and it recommends no specific contractor, wage or rate.