Commercial diver salary, country by country

Why almost nobody publishes a diver salary

Commercial diving is too small to show up in most wage statistics. A national labour-force survey needs a usable sample inside an occupation before it will publish a median, and divers rarely clear that bar. The United States counted 2,790 commercial divers in the May 2023 round of its Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics programme. Australia counted 890 people whose main job was diving in the 2021 census. New Zealand counted 310 in 2023. Those are not populations a statistician can slice by region and experience.

The second problem is that divers are often not employees in the sense a wage survey understands. A large share of offshore work is day-rate contract work, booked per job, sometimes through an agency in a third country, paid gross. A statistical office that samples payrolls will miss most of it. Where the money is highest, the data is thinnest.

The third problem is classification. Almost no country gives divers their own occupation code. The United States does — SOC 49-9092, Commercial Divers. Canada does not: Job Bank files commercial divers under NOC 72999, "other technical trades and related occupations". The United Kingdom does not: divers appear as a related job title inside SOC 2020 code 5319, "construction and building trades not elsewhere classified", alongside a long list of unrelated trades. Any figure drawn from a broad code describes the code, not the job.

So the honest country-by-country picture is three tiers: a small number of countries with a real diver wage series, a larger number with an official floor or a visa benchmark but no earnings data, and most of the world with nothing official at all. Below, each figure is given in its own currency with the year it refers to, and the source is named.

The country-by-country table

This is the whole answer in one place. Read the "what it is" column before you read the number — a statutory minimum, a survey median and a visa threshold are three different things and comparing them directly will mislead you.

Sources: O*NET OnLine, Commercial Divers wages (BLS 2025 data); Job Bank Canada, wages updated 19 November 2025; gov.uk Skilled Worker going rates, updated 22 July 2025; National Careers Service, Diver; Fair Work Commission, MA000108 wages determination; Jobs and Skills Australia, Diver; Tahatū, Diver; utdanning.no, Dykker.

United States: the only real diver wage series in the world

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics is the only statistical office that runs a dedicated commercial diver occupation and publishes a full wage distribution for it. That makes American figures the backbone of any international comparison, and it also makes them the most misquoted.

For May 2025 the distribution looks like this.

Source: O*NET OnLine, national wages for Commercial Divers 49-9092.00, reproducing Bureau of Labor Statistics 2025 wage data.

Two things follow from that table. The first is that the median American commercial diver earns roughly what a skilled maintenance tradesman earns. The second is that the top decile earns more than three and a half times the bottom decile — a wider spread than most trades, because the same occupation code covers a man working a municipal water intake in the Midwest and a man on a dive support vessel in the Gulf.

The same BLS programme projects employment of about 4,000 commercial divers in 2025 and growth of 5 to 6 per cent to 2035, with roughly 400 openings over the decade. That is a small trade getting slightly less small.

The national median also hides almost everything useful, because state medians diverge wildly. Here are the six states that matter most to divers, at May 2025.

Source: O*NET OnLine state wages for Commercial Divers, Bureau of Labor Statistics 2025 wage data.

This is the result most people find counter-intuitive. Louisiana is the centre of American commercial diving — it had 560 of the 2,790 divers counted in May 2023, by far the largest concentration in the country — and its median sits US$10,760 below the national median. Texas, home to the Gulf's engineering and contracting base, has the lowest median of the six. Washington State, which has no offshore oil industry at all, has a median of US$161,800: more than three times Texas. New York, which has none either, is only 2.5 per cent behind it at US$157,800 — the two top-paying states for divers are the two with the least offshore work.

The explanation is not that divers in Puget Sound are better than divers in Morgan City. It is the pay system. Washington and California diving work is heavily weighted towards public works, naval facilities and port construction, where union pile-driver agreements and state prevailing-wage law set the rate. Gulf Coast offshore diving is day-rate work in a crowded contractor market with no equivalent floor. The regulation, not the depth, sets the number.

Metro-level figures from the same release make the same point: the Houston metropolitan area median was US$50,920, while San Diego's was US$101,550.

The American rates nobody quotes: prevailing wage and military diving pay

If you want a hard, legally binding American diver rate rather than a survey average, read a prevailing-wage determination. California's Department of Industrial Relations publishes diver classifications inside its pile driver and carpenter craft determinations, and the rates are the minimum a contractor must pay on a state public works job.

Sources: California DIR determination SC-23-31-2-2025-2 and NC-23-31-11-2025-1, both issued 22 August 2025, expiring 30 June 2026. "Total" is the basic hourly rate plus fringe benefits.

Those are hourly figures. A wet diver in northern California on a public works job is owed US$156.07 for every hour in the water, and both determinations guarantee divers, tenders and stand-by divers a minimum of eight hours' pay for any day or part of a day worked. The rate also only covers work to 50 feet; deeper rates are set case by case by the DIR's research unit.

Two things in these documents are more revealing than the rates. First, a stand-by diver — a man sitting on deck, dressed in, doing nothing — is owed US$73.89 an hour basic in northern California. Diving pay is largely payment for availability and risk, not for productive work. Second, both determinations list classifications for Saturation Diver, Manned Submersible operator, Manifold Operator/Life Support Technician, Bell Winch Operator and ROV pilot, then decline to publish a rate for any of them, directing the reader to telephone the department. Even the one government in the world that publishes binding diver rates will not put a saturation number in writing.

One more American rate is worth knowing, because it is published to the dollar and makes the same point from the other direction. Military divers are not commercial divers. Under US Department of Defense rules, hazardous duty incentive pay for diving duty runs from US$110 to US$340 a month depending on service and qualification, with officers between US$110 and US$240. The statutory authority is 37 U.S.C. § 351, and Volume 7A Chapter 11 of the Financial Management Regulation, dated July 2025, states that diving duty special pay is "not more than $240 per month" while its own tables list US$340 for master divers.

Source: US DoD Financial Management Regulation, Volume 7A, Chapter 11, July 2025, tables 11-2 to 11-9.

A US Navy master diver's diving pay is a few hundred dollars a month on top of base pay. A northern California wet diver on a public works job, working to 50 feet, is owed US$156.07 an hour. Same skill set, two entirely different pay systems — which is the whole argument of this article, compressed into one comparison. What a diver earns is decided less by what they can do than by which market, which agreement and which country's rules they happen to be working under.

Canada: an hourly trade with no offshore premium

Canada's federal Job Bank publishes wage estimates built from Statistics Canada's Labour Force Survey, Employment Insurance records and a small-area estimation model. Commercial divers fall inside NOC 72999. The wages below were updated on 19 November 2025 and refer to 2023–2024 or 2024 depending on province.

Source: Job Bank, Commercial Diver wages in Canada (NOC 72999), wages updated 19 November 2025; reference period 2023–2024 or 2024. Figures for Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island, Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut cannot be published for data reasons.

Newfoundland and Labrador has the widest spread in the country — C$19.00 at the low end, C$65.71 at the high end — which is what an offshore oil province looks like when a handful of well-paid offshore jobs sit alongside ordinary inshore work. Quebec has both the lowest low and the lowest median. Job Bank also reports that 87.6 per cent of workers in this occupation group receive at least one non-wage benefit, which is unusually high for a trade with this much contract work.

What Canada does not have is a saturation market. If you search for a Canadian saturation diver salary you will not find an official one, because there is effectively no resident saturation work to price. Our guide to how commercial diving is regulated in Canada and where the work actually is goes through the provincial jurisdiction split and the CSA standard that governs it. Canadians who want saturation leave the country to get it.

United Kingdom: the North Sea premium that no public figure captures

The UK is the most frustrating country in this exercise. It has one of the two or three deepest saturation diving markets on earth and it publishes nothing useful about diver pay.

The Office for National Statistics does not break divers out. The Home Office does publish a figure, because it has to: to sponsor a diver on a Skilled Worker visa an employer must meet the going rate for occupation code 5319, which is £33,400 a year, or £17.13 an hour. A lower band of £27,300 a year, or £14.00 an hour, applies to applicants who qualify for a discount. That list was updated on 22 July 2025. It is an official UK number and it is the best the state offers — but code 5319 is a catch-all construction group, so £33,400 describes that group, not divers.

The government's own careers service is more honest about it. The National Careers Service job profile for Diver gives typical hours of 42 to 44 a week and, under average salary, the single word "variable". It declines to give a number at all.

What the UK does have is a collective agreement. The Offshore Diving Industry Agreement sets minimum rates, allowances and health insurance for diving crews on the UK continental shelf, is renegotiated every three years, and in 2018 covered Subsea 7, KD Marine, NSea, Helix Energy Solutions, TechnipFMC and Rever Offshore, as reported by Energy Voice. In August 2024 the RMT announced that nearly 90 per cent of more than 800 members had backed a three-year deal: a 15 per cent uplift from May 2024, then 4.5 per cent in 2025 and 4.5 per cent in 2026. The same deal increased the bend watch rate from 12 hours to 24 hours, raised the travel allowance by 36 per cent and reinstated six public holidays withdrawn during the pandemic.

Those percentages are real and sourced. The base they apply to is another matter. ODIA does not publish its rate schedule; the figures in circulation are third-party reproductions of the Schedule of Rates dated January 2026, and cannot be checked against the primary document. We take one of those reproductions apart, grade by grade, in what a saturation diver actually earns.

Australia and New Zealand: an award floor and almost no data

Australia is the only country in this article where a tribunal sets diver pay by classification. The Professional Diving Industry (Industrial) Award 2020 [MA000108] has four classifications, and the Fair Work Commission publishes the minimum rates each year. Crucially, it publishes them in two columns: an inshore rate and a much higher offshore rate. The inshore column is the one quoted everywhere, including, until now, by us.

Sources: Fair Work Commission determination PR773997, operative 1 July 2024; and the Annual Wage Review 2024–25 draft determination for MA000108, operative 1 July 2025.

Taken at face value, a Diver's inshore award floor of A$1,283.50 a week is about A$66,742 a year before any allowance; the offshore floor of A$2,240.19 a week is about A$116,490. Both are floors and nothing more — nobody works offshore in Australia for award minimum. The interesting part of the award is the allowances, because they are the only place in any country's law where saturation work carries a published price.

Under the award's allowance clauses from 1 July 2025, diving attracts A$4.99 per metre of depth, or A$1.49 per foot or equivalent pressure. There is a minimum payment of 50 times the per-foot rate — A$74.50 — for a 12-hour period. For work using saturation techniques the minimum payment is 250 times the per-foot rate, or A$372.50 per 12-hour period. Atmospheric diving suit operations also carry a 250-times minimum, set at A$185.00. Non-destructive testing adds A$74.74 a day, and hyperbaric welding is priced at A$6.16 per linear millimetre of weld, dropping to A$4.14 for a weld requiring repair. A separate schedule for other operations sets the depth allowance at A$5.52 per metre and NDT at A$83.56 a day. The 2024 determination also carried a disability allowance of A$82.06 per on-duty day, rising to A$97.35 for casuals.

Being paid per linear millimetre of weld is a strange sensation and it is genuinely how the Australian instrument works.

For actual earnings, Australia publishes nothing. The Jobs and Skills Australia profile for Diver reports 890 people employed, a median age of 35 and 74.1 per cent working full time, all from an ABS 2021 census custom report — and leaves the earnings field empty. The older ANZSCO profile for Divers shows 910 employed and prints "N/A" for both median weekly earnings and annual employment growth, with a note that the ANZSCO profiles will not be updated again and that occupation-based replacements were due in mid-2026. If you have seen a confident "saturation diver salary Australia per month" figure, it did not come from the Australian government.

New Zealand's careers portal, Tahatū, gives a pay band of NZ$57,000 to NZ$102,000 a year for divers and counts 310 people in the job at the 2023 census, with a strong increase since 2018. The page links to a general "where our data comes from" note rather than naming a survey for the pay band, so treat it as a government estimate rather than a measurement.

Europe, the Gulf, Asia and Africa: the gaps, stated plainly

This is the section most pages on this subject skip, because it consists of admitting ignorance.

Norway has one of the most tightly regulated diving industries in the world and a long, painful history of litigation over the North Sea pioneer divers. Its national careers portal, utdanning.no, carries a heading reading "Hva tjener dykkere?" — what do divers earn — with nothing underneath it. The page was last reviewed with Western Norway University of Applied Sciences in September 2024. Statistics Norway publishes earnings by occupation, but we could not retrieve a published diver-specific series, and we are not going to estimate one.

Ireland publishes no occupational wage figure for divers. The market is small and project-driven; our note on commercial diving in Ireland and how to get into it covers the access route and the kind of work that exists there. Searches for "commercial diver salary Ireland" return aggregator estimates built from job adverts, which is not the same thing as data.

The Gulf states — the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia — publish no occupational wage statistics that include divers. "Commercial diver salary in Dubai" and "commercial diver salary in Qatar" are among the most searched phrasings on this topic and among the least answerable. What can be said factually is that Gulf diving pay is quoted in day rates, usually in US dollars, usually tax-free to the diver, usually through an agency, and that the number depends far more on which agency holds the contract than on the country.

India, Malaysia and Singapore likewise have no published diver wage series we could locate. Singapore's Ministry of Manpower publishes median wages for hundreds of occupations, but we could not confirm commercial diving among them. India's offshore market is real and long-established, and Indian-qualified divers are a significant part of the global labour pool, but no government figure describes what they are paid.

South Africa regulates diving carefully under its occupational health and safety framework and publishes nothing on pay. The country is a net exporter of divers rather than a large employer of them.

There is a structural reason for all of this, and it is visible in our own data. Across 876 commercial diving companies in 59 countries, only 17 run saturation operations at all. Most countries in that list have a handful of inshore contractors and no deep market to price. A country without offshore work does not have a diver wage distribution so much as a few employers and whatever they pay.

Saturation pay: what can be sourced and what cannot

Saturation is the money question, and it is the one with the worst evidence. Let us be exact about what exists.

No government anywhere publishes a saturation diving wage. California comes closest and explicitly refuses, listing the classification and withholding the rate. Australia prices saturation only as a minimum allowance of A$372.50 per 12-hour period, which is an allowance floor on top of a weekly minimum, not an earnings estimate. The UK's ODIA contains real saturation rates: ODIA does not publish its rate schedule, and the figures in circulation are third-party reproductions of the Schedule of Rates dated January 2026, which cannot be checked against the primary document.

What is left is industry and agency figures, which should be labelled as such and read with suspicion. Worldwide Recruitment Solutions, an offshore crewing agency, published a set of 2026 figures in March 2026 (last modified August 2026) which are at least attributable to a named company with a commercial interest in being roughly right.

Source: Worldwide Recruitment Solutions, "Diving Jobs in 2026", published 6 March 2026, last modified 20 August 2026. These are an agency's own estimates, not survey data.

Now read that table critically, because it demonstrates the problem. The same article states that US saturation divers average US$30,000 to US$45,000 a month and that the 90th percentile reaches US$186,000 or more a year. Those two statements cannot both describe the same population: US$30,000 a month is US$360,000 a year. The monthly figure must mean money earned while in saturation, and the annual figure must mean a whole year including the months with no bell runs. If a source does not tell you which it means, you cannot use it to plan a career.

That distinction is the single most important thing to understand about saturation pay. A saturation diver is paid a day rate plus a depth or saturation bonus for every hour under pressure, and then goes home for weeks. Annualising a sat day rate produces a fantasy. If you want the mechanics before the money, start with what saturation diving actually involves.

There is a further reason to distrust saturation figures as a career plan: almost nobody gets there. The pay gap between air diving and saturation is wide enough that most people considering the trade assume saturation is the normal destination. It is not, and the reason is capacity rather than talent.

Our own audits of the industry found that just 17 of 876 commercial diving companies run saturation operations — 1.9 per cent of the sector. The work is done from a fleet of 46 dive support vessels with a median build year of 2009, carrying 493 diver berths across 28 vessels. That is the global ceiling on how many people can be in saturation at once, and it is a number in the hundreds.

Training is the second bottleneck. Of the 34 schools in our school directory, only five teach saturation. And the work itself is shrinking at the deep end: only 41 per cent of the offshore platforms we catalogued stand in water shallower than 300 metres, which is roughly where diver intervention stops and ROVs take over. Deep-water fields are built to be maintained without divers.

So when you compare a country's diver median against a saturation day rate, you are comparing a population of thousands against a population of hundreds. The median is the realistic number. The day rate is the outlier.

Comparing countries properly: one currency, one date

Converting between currencies is where country comparisons usually go wrong, because the writer picks a rate from memory. The table below uses the European Central Bank's euro reference rates for 7 October 2026 — USD 1.1177, GBP 0.84645, CAD 1.5931, AUD 1.6079, NZD 1.9977 to the euro — and converts each country's own published figure. The ECB publishes these rates for information and advises against using them for transactions, so treat the euro column as a comparison aid, not a price.

Conversions calculated from ECB euro foreign exchange reference rates for 7 October 2026. Australian annualised figures are the published weekly award minimum multiplied by 52.

Read like that, the headline spread between developed countries with published data is narrower than the raw currency figures suggest — roughly €39,000 to €65,000 for a median or a floor — with the American tails doing most of the work. The genuine outliers are regional and regulatory, not national.

What the internet gets wrong about diver pay

Search "saturation diving wages" and look at what comes back. A large share of the top results are not diving sites at all: they are spam pages hosted on subdomains belonging to universities, museums and software companies that have no connection to the industry. Those pages carry confident six-figure numbers with no source. They exist because the keyword is valuable and the topic is unpoliced.

Five specific errors recur.

Quoting a sat day rate as an annual salary. The most common and the most damaging. A rate of £1,000 a day is not £365,000 a year. Saturation divers work in blocks and spend much of the year not working.

Treating a mean as a typical wage. The US mean sat above the US median by around US$14,000 in the May 2023 data — US$75,570 against US$61,300 — because a small number of very high earners drag the mean up. In an occupation this skewed, the median is the only honest single number.

Quoting retired data as current. BLS static occupation pages stopped updating, so the easily scraped US diver figure on many sites is the May 2023 median of US$61,300 rather than the May 2025 median of US$72,990.

Inventing figures for countries that publish none. There is no official diver salary for Dubai, Qatar, India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa or Ireland. Any precise figure for those markets is an estimate from job adverts at best.

Confusing a floor with a wage. Australia's A$1,283.50 a week inshore, or A$2,240.19 offshore, is what an employer may not go below. The UK's £33,400 is what a visa sponsor must at least pay. Neither tells you what anybody earns.

Reading an offer before you sign it

Country medians are useful for deciding where to build a career. They are useless for judging a specific job. These are the questions that change the real number, and they are the same in every market.

Is the rate per day worked or per day away? Mobilisation, travel and standby days are sometimes paid at a reduced rate and sometimes not paid at all. A £600 day rate on a 28-day trip with 20 working days is a different proposition from the same rate paid portal to portal.

Is depth pay included or on top? In Australia it is explicitly on top, at a published per-metre rate. In the Gulf it is often folded into a single number. Ask which.

Who is the employer of record, and in which country? Agency placement through a third country changes your tax position, your insurance and who is liable if something goes wrong. The crewing agencies and job routes we list vary enormously on this point.

What does the medical and recertification cycle cost you? Annual medicals, ticket renewals and courses are usually the diver's own expense, and they come out of the gross figure.

How many days a year will there actually be? This is the number that determines your income, and it is the one no advertisement states. A high day rate on 90 days a year is worse than a moderate rate on 200.

If you are starting out rather than comparing offers, the realistic path matters more than the ceiling. We have written up the money in detail for one market in particular: our breakdown of what a commercial diver really earns in Chile goes through local pay by sector, including salmon farm work, which is where most Chilean divers start. The same logic applies wherever you are: the entry wage is local, the ceiling is international, and the gap between them is measured in years and tickets, not in months.

For a broader view of what the trade pays by role rather than by country, see our overview of what commercial divers are paid.

Sources

1. O*NET OnLine — Wages for Commercial Divers (49-9092.00), national and state, BLS 2025 wage data, consulted 8 October 2026.
2. O*NET OnLine — Summary report for Commercial Divers (49-9092.00), consulted 8 October 2026.
3. US Bureau of Labor Statistics — Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2023: 49-9092 Commercial Divers, last modified 3 April 2024, consulted 8 October 2026.
4. US Bureau of Labor Statistics — OEWS current tables and data tools, consulted 8 October 2026.
5. California Department of Industrial Relations — Prevailing wage determination SC-23-31-2-2025-2, issued 22 August 2025, consulted 8 October 2026.
6. California Department of Industrial Relations — Prevailing wage determination NC-23-31-11-2025-1, issued 22 August 2025, consulted 8 October 2026.
7. US Department of Defense — Financial Management Regulation, Volume 7A, Chapter 11: Hazardous Duty Incentive Pay, July 2025, consulted 8 October 2026.
8. Job Bank (Government of Canada) — Commercial Diver wages in Canada, NOC 72999, wages updated 19 November 2025, page modified 24 September 2026, consulted 8 October 2026.
9. UK Home Office — Skilled Worker visa: going rates for eligible occupation codes, updated 22 July 2025, consulted 8 October 2026.
10. National Careers Service (UK) — Diver job profile, consulted 8 October 2026.
11. RMT — Offshore divers win substantial pay deal, 15 August 2024, consulted 8 October 2026.
12. Energy Voice — Offshore divers reject pay deal after RMT ballot, 26 November 2018, consulted 8 October 2026.
13. Fair Work Commission — Determination PR773997, Professional Diving Industry (Industrial) Award 2020 [MA000108], operative 1 July 2024, consulted 8 October 2026.
14. Fair Work Commission — Annual Wage Review 2024–25 draft wages determination, MA000108, operative 1 July 2025, consulted 8 October 2026.
15. Jobs and Skills Australia — Diver (OSCA 399932) occupation profile, ABS 2021 Census custom report, consulted 8 October 2026.
16. Jobs and Skills Australia — Divers (ANZSCO 399911) occupation profile, consulted 8 October 2026.
17. Tahatū (New Zealand Government) — Diver, Kairuku, consulted 8 October 2026.
18. utdanning.no (Norway) — Dykker, reviewed 25 September 2024, consulted 8 October 2026.
19. European Central Bank — Euro foreign exchange reference rates, 7 October 2026, consulted 8 October 2026.
20. Worldwide Recruitment Solutions — Diving Jobs in 2026: From Commercial to Offshore, published 6 March 2026, last modified 20 August 2026, consulted 8 October 2026.

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