Underwater welding: the pay, the training and the myth

"Underwater welder" is not a job. It is a task.

Start here, because almost every misleading salary figure on the internet comes from getting this wrong.

The US Standard Occupational Classification has no code for underwater welder. It has 49-9092, Commercial Divers, defined as working below the surface with surface-supplied air or scuba to inspect, repair, remove or install equipment and structures. Welding is one of twenty-four tasks listed against that code. The sample job titles reported by people doing the work include "Diver", "Diver Tender", "Salvage Diver", "Saturation Diver" and, revealingly, "NDT UW Welder" — non-destructive testing underwater welder, with the inspection function named first.

The task importance ratings on the same occupation profile tell the story more bluntly. Inspecting and testing docks, ships, pipelines, cables or sewers scores 78. Inspecting the condition of underwater steel or wood structures scores 77. Operating underwater video or sonar scores 74. Cutting and welding steel with underwater welding equipment scores 73, and non-destructive testing such as checking for cracks in offshore rig legs scores 72.

Welding is in there. It is not at the top. If you want a realistic mental picture of the trade, picture ultrasonic thickness measurement, hull cleaning and visual inspection reports, punctuated by occasional thermal cutting and rarer welding.

The certification record says the same thing. O*NET lists twelve national certifications associated with commercial divers: ten from the Association of Diving Contractors International, one from PADI, one from the National Board of Diving and Hyperbaric Medical Technology. The ADCI cards are Entry Level Tender Diver, Air Diver, Mixed Gas Diver, Bell/Saturation Diving, the three supervisor grades, Life Support Technician, Saturation Technician and Nitrobox Supervisor. Not one of the twelve is an underwater welding certification.

What commercial divers actually earn in the United States

This is the only large, honest, free dataset in the world on diver pay, so it is worth reading carefully.

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2025 wage data, as published by O*NET OnLine for Commercial Divers and Welders, Cutters, Solderers and Brazers.

Read the median first. A commercial diver in the United States sits on US$72,990. A topside welder sits on US$53,750. The diving premium at the median is about 36 per cent — real, worth having, and nothing like the multiples the internet promises.

Now read the tails. The bottom tenth of commercial divers earn US$43,330, which is only about US$4,000 more than the bottom tenth of topside welders. The top tenth earn US$157,790, which is roughly double the top tenth of topside welders. Diving does not raise the floor much. It raises the ceiling a lot, for the few who reach it.

The older, fully published BLS table is worth comparing because it carries detail the summary figures do not. In the May 2023 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release, commercial divers numbered 2,790 jobs with a mean annual wage of US$75,570 and a median of US$61,300. Note that the mean sat well above the median even then: a minority of very well paid divers drags the average up, which is exactly why "average underwater welder salary" is the wrong question to ask.

That 2023 release also named the top-paying states by mean annual wage: New York at US$155,630, Washington at US$154,630 and California at US$134,310. And it showed where divers actually work — 1,070 of the 2,790 were in "Other Support Services" at a mean of US$85,310, and 570 were in heavy and civil engineering construction at US$75,630.

Source: BLS, Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2023, 49-9092 Commercial Divers, last modified 3 April 2024.

The day rates that do exist, and who gets them

Here is the part the salary aggregators miss. The headline hourly rates in commercial diving are real, published and verifiable. They are also attached to specific jobs on specific days, not to annual salaries.

California publishes prevailing wage determinations for public works. The engineering construction determination for San Diego County, issued 22 August 2025, sets these rates.

Source: California Department of Industrial Relations, prevailing wage determination SD-23-31-4-2025-2, issued 22 August 2025, expires 30 June 2026.

A wet diver on a Californian public works job is on US$141.82 an hour all-in, guaranteed a minimum of eight hours for any day or part of a day worked. The determination also notes that rates for depths beyond 50 feet, and for pressurised bell and saturation diving, are available only on request from the Office of the Director — which tells you how thin the public record gets as soon as you go deeper.

So why is the national median US$72,990 and not US$200,000? Because a diver on US$141.82 an hour does not get 2,000 of those hours a year. Between jobs there is standby at US$85.45, tending at US$84.45, travel, weather, and unpaid weeks. The annual figure is the hourly rate multiplied by however many days the contractor can sell. That gap between the day rate and the annual income is the single most important thing to understand about pay in this trade, and it is the thing every "underwater welder salary" article leaves out.

Australia pays hyperbaric welders by the millimetre

Australia is the only jurisdiction we have found that writes underwater welding into law as a paid classification with its own minimum rate. The Professional Diving Industry (Industrial) Award, MA000108, has done this for years, and the rates below took effect from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2025.

Source: Fair Work Ombudsman pay guide for the Professional Diving Industry (Industrial) Award MA000108, published 25 June 2025, rates effective from 1 July 2025. Figures are legal minimums, not market rates.

Three things in that table reward attention.

First, the hyperbaric welder sits above the life support technician and below the supervisor. It is a senior technical grade, not a glamorous one, and the award recognises it only in the dry-chamber form. There is no "wet welder" classification at all.

Second, the offshore-inshore gap is brutal. The same classification is worth A$2,748.17 a week offshore and A$1,342.70 a week inshore. An inshore hyperbaric welder's minimum is below an offshore diver's attendant. If you take one number away from this article, take that one: the sector you work in matters more than the skill you hold.

Third, and this is the detail nobody else publishes: the award pays hyperbaric welding by the length of weld. A$6.16 per linear millimetre offshore if the client accepts the weld, A$4.14 per linear millimetre if it has to be repaired first. Inshore it is A$6.29 and A$4.24. A 300 mm accepted weld offshore is A$1,848 in allowance on top of the weekly rate.

The same award pays divers a depth allowance of A$4.99 per metre offshore, with a floor of A$74.50 per 12-hour period for a non-saturation dive and A$372.50 per 12-hour period for a saturation dive. Stack the floor onto the base rate and an offshore diver in saturation is on roughly A$2,240 a week of base pay plus A$2,607.50 of minimum saturation allowance for seven 12-hour periods. That is the legal minimum. Real sat contracts pay more.

Canada, the United Kingdom and the figures that do not exist

Outside the United States and Australia, public wage data on diving collapses. This matters, because "average underwater welder salary canada" and "offshore underwater welder salary uk" are among the most searched phrases on this topic and the honest answer to both is uncomfortable.

Canada's federal Job Bank publishes wages for the occupation Commercial Diver, which sits inside the broad NOC 72999 group. Nationally it reports a low of C$21.63 an hour, a median of C$34.72 and a high of C$47.85, for wages updated 19 November 2025. By province the median runs from C$28.00 in Quebec to C$37.32 in British Columbia, with Newfoundland and Labrador at C$36.15 and Alberta at C$35.50.

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.

A Canadian median of C$34.72 an hour is not a six-figure career. It is a trade wage. The high end at C$47.85 nationally, and C$65.71 in Newfoundland and Labrador, is better, and it is the figure a Red Seal welder who also dives might reach on inshore work — but Job Bank's dataset simply does not contain the offshore saturation contracts that people imagine when they search for this.

The United Kingdom is worse. The National Careers Service job profile for "Diver" lists the average salary as "Variable" and gives no starter or experienced figure at all. The UK's occupational classification does not have a diving code: divers are folded into SOC 5319, Construction and building trades not elsewhere classified. The only official annual number attached to that code is the Home Office's Skilled Worker going rate of £33,400 a year, or £17.13 an hour. For comparison, SOC 5213, Welding trades, has a going rate of £34,900, or £17.90 an hour.

Sources: National Careers Service, Diver; gov.uk, Immigration Rules Appendix Skilled Occupations, codes 5319 and 5213.

The closest thing to hard UK offshore pay information is collective bargaining news. In August 2024 the RMT announced a three-year settlement under the Offshore Diving Industry Agreement worth close to 25 per cent in total: 15 per cent from May, then 4.5 per cent in 2025 and 4.5 per cent in 2026, with the bell watch payment extended from 12 to 24 hours and travel allowance up 36 per cent. The union published the percentages but not the underlying day rates. 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 work through one of those reproductions in what a saturation diver actually earns. We cover the geography of that work in our comparison of the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.

What graduates actually earn: the dataset nobody cites

Every commercial diving school markets outcomes. Three of them are also Title IV institutions in the United States, which means the Department of Education publishes their tuition, completion rates and the median earnings of their former students through College Scorecard. This is, as far as we can tell, the only independent audit of diving school outcomes that exists anywhere.

Source: US Department of Education, College Scorecard, queried 8 October 2026. Tuition, enrolment and completion from the 2024 data file; earnings from the 2020 data file, the most recent year the earnings measure is reported for these institutions. Earnings are suppressed where the cohort is too small to publish.

Ten years after they started, the median former student of the best-documented commercial diving school in the United States was earning US$62,489. The median former student of the Houston school was on US$53,474. Both are good trade incomes. Neither is US$300,000, and both are below the US$72,990 median that BLS reports for people who are still working as commercial divers — which is what you would expect if a meaningful share of graduates leave diving within a decade.

Two caveats, stated plainly. The earnings figures come from an earlier cohort, so they are not 2026 money. And they cover everyone who enrolled, including those who never finished and those who moved into topside work, which is the honest basis for a question like "is underwater welding worth it" — you are buying a probability, not a salary.

Two of the best-known US schools, CDA Technical Institute and Divers Academy International, do not appear in College Scorecard at all, so no comparable outcome data exists for them. Our school directory lists 34 commercial diving schools worldwide, and we found that only five of them teach saturation.

What the training really costs

Course prices are the one area where the internet is approximately right, mostly because schools publish them.

Divers Institute of Technology's own financial aid page, last modified 24 September 2026, breaks its programme cost into tuition of US$29,000, gear at US$5,000 and a dive physical at US$850. The school is explicit that this is the direct programme cost and not a total budget: housing and living expenses for the duration are on you, and the page lists seven monthly modules. The published items sum to US$34,850 before you have eaten or slept anywhere.

Note that this is US$1,500 above the US$27,500 tuition the Department of Education recorded for the same school in its 2024 file. Prices in this sector move upward every year, so always check the school's current page rather than a figure in an article — including this one.

In Europe the structure is different: you buy qualifications one at a time rather than a single programme.

Sources: Andark, HSE SCUBA training course (page last modified 13 August 2026); BIM / National Fisheries College of Ireland, Surface Supplied Diving Operations; DEEP, HSE Closed Bell Diver course; Divers Institute of Technology, Financial Aid.

The costs the schools do not put on the price list are the ones that catch people out. Andark's HSE SCUBA prerequisites alone include PADI Rescue Diver or BSAC Dive Leader standard, a full three-year First Aid at Work certificate rather than a one-day course, a chamber orientation day, oxygen administration training, drysuit competence evidenced in a logbook, and an annual HSE diving medical in date for the whole course. Every one of those is a separate bill. We walk through the full route in our guide to training as a commercial diver.

Wet or dry: what you would actually be doing

AWS D3.6M, the Underwater Welding Code, is the document that governs this work. It was first published in 1983 and the current sixth edition is D3.6M:2017, which costs US$102 to AWS members and US$136 to everyone else. It covers five environments: wet welding with no barrier between water and arc; welding in a pressure vessel reduced to about one atmosphere; welding in a habitat large enough to dispense with diving equipment; dry chamber welding in an open-bottomed enclosure covering the welder's head and shoulders; and dry-spot welding in a small gas-filled enclosure with the welder outside in the water.

The code sorts finished welds into classes, and the classes are the whole commercial story.

Sources: American Welding Society, D3.6M:2017 Underwater Welding Code; AWS, D3.6M:1999 (historical); ANSI, Underwater Welding Code AWS D3.6M:2017; TWI, standards for underwater MMA welding.

Why does wet welding struggle to reach Class A? Physics. Water quenches the weld. A 2008 review from Gdańsk University of Technology reports cooling rates between 800 °C and 500 °C ranging from 415 to 56 °C per second, and diffusible hydrogen in wet welds made with covered electrodes running from 45.90 to 87.40 ml per 100 g of iron — against 5 to 21 ml for local cavity welding. Fast cooling plus a great deal of hydrogen is the classic recipe for a hard, crack-prone heat-affected zone.

TWI's own research work put numbers on how hard that is to beat. Using rutile electrodes with a controlled deposition temper bead technique, heat-affected zone hardness at or below 325 HV — the AWS D3.6 Class A limit — was obtained, but not consistently, and welds that did reach the Class A hardness figure still showed hydrogen cracking. Oxyrutile electrodes with buttering generally met the Class B limit of 375 HV with significantly less heat-affected zone cracking, but are prone to solidification cracking at the weld root and are rated low for user friendliness.

The practical consequence: wet welding is a repair and reinforcement technique, usually classified B, used because it is quick and cheap. The Gdańsk review notes the cost and time of a dry repair runs at roughly twice a wet one, and that wet welding with covered electrodes or flux-cored wire is carried out down to around 100 metres, while manual dry hyperbaric welding reaches about 300 metres. Local cavity work meets classification society requirements to roughly 200 metres. We go into the trade-offs in detail in wet versus hyperbaric dry welding.

There is no underwater welding certificate to buy

This deserves its own section because it is where money gets wasted.

Welder qualification under D3.6M is procedure-based. A contractor writes a welding procedure specification for a specific joint, material, position, depth and consumable, qualifies the procedure, then qualifies individual welders against it. The qualification belongs to that procedure and that employer. It is not a portable licence you earn at school and carry for life, and no national certification body in the O*NET list issues one.

What you can buy at school is the diving qualification, plus familiarisation with the equipment. Everything that makes you employable as an underwater welder — the coupon tests, the procedure qualification, the client approvals — happens after you are hired, on the employer's paperwork.

Be sceptical of any course marketed as making you a "certified underwater welder". Ask which AWS D3.6M class, under whose procedure, and whether the qualification survives you changing employer. The honest answer to the last question is usually no.

The jobs arithmetic: 400 openings, and how little diving happens

Set the supply of trained divers against the demand for them and the picture is stark.

BLS projects about 400 annual openings for commercial divers across the entire United States, in an occupation of roughly 4,000 people growing to 4,200 by 2035. Those 400 openings include everyone who retires, dies, is injured out, or simply leaves.

Against that, the three US commercial diving schools in College Scorecard reported a combined 461 students in the 2024 file — 198 at Divers Institute of Technology, 192 at Ocean Corporation and 71 at Commercial Divers International. Those three are not the whole picture: CDA Technical Institute and Divers Academy International are not in the dataset, and neither are the non-US schools.

Three schools, with no claim to being all of the market, enrol more people per year than the entire country's projected annual openings. That is the mechanism behind every story you have read about graduates spending two years tending before they get wet.

It is worse at the top. Of 876 diving companies in our own company directory, we found that only 17 run saturation — 1.9 per cent. There are 493 diver berths across 28 vessels in the world's saturation fleet. The bottleneck is not your skill. It is the number of chairs.

The training bottleneck in Britain tells the same story from the other side. HSE lists 12 recognised Diver Competence Assessment Organisations in Great Britain. Eleven of them can assess HSE SCUBA. Exactly two — Commercial Diver Training Ltd in St Austell and The Professional Diving Academy in Dunoon — are listed for Surface Supplied and Surface Supplied Top Up, the qualifications you need to work offshore. None is listed for Closed Bell on that page, and DEEP's new three-week closed bell course takes six students per cohort, with its January to April 2027 intakes already shown as fully booked.

Source: HSE, Diver competence assessment organisations, updated 26 February 2026; DEEP, HSE Closed Bell Diver course.

If you want to know why there are so few jobs, look at the only national regulator that publishes annual diving exposure figures.

Norway's Havtilsynet reported that in 2025, across the Norwegian continental shelf and foreign shelves under Norwegian jurisdiction, there were 53,396 man-hours in saturation over 134 vessel days. Surface-oriented offshore diving accounted for 40 vessel days and 228 man-hours in the water. For the whole year. In one of the most active offshore provinces on earth.

Two hundred and twenty-eight hours is less than six working weeks of one person's time. Incidents for the year were one near-miss, two minor personal injuries and four possible ear infections in saturation, and nothing at all in surface-oriented diving.

Source: Havtilsynet (Norwegian Ocean Industry Authority), Diving report for 2025, published 29 January 2026.

Diver-based intervention has been replaced, year by year, by remotely operated vehicles and by designing structures so they do not need people in the water. We found that only 41 per cent of offshore platforms sit within 300 metres of water depth, which is roughly the practical limit of saturation diving. The deep work is already robotic.

What the internet gets wrong

Four claims recur, and all four fail on contact with a source.

"Underwater welders earn $200,000 to $300,000." The national 90th percentile for US commercial divers is US$157,790. Not the 99th — the 90th. Nine out of ten commercial divers in the United States earn less than that. A few state tables do run higher: BLS's own May 2025 figures for Washington give a median of US$161,800 and a 90th percentile of US$250,960, so US$200,000 is not impossible for a unionised diver in the right state. What no wage survey, award, prevailing wage determination or government dataset supports is US$300,000 as a typical or expected salary. Where that figure appears it is a scraped job advert, an exceptional sat season reported as a salary, or nothing at all.

"Underwater welding has a 15 per cent fatality rate." This number has no traceable source. It would mean that roughly one in seven underwater welders dies on the job, which would make it, by orders of magnitude, the most lethal legal occupation in recorded history. The US Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries does not publish a fatality rate for commercial divers at all, in its 2024 release of 19 February 2026 or in any earlier one, because the occupation is too small to generate a statistically publishable one. If the US government cannot compute a rate, nobody quoting a precise percentage obtained it honestly.

"The internet's one real safety statistic." There is a genuine figure behind some of the alarm, and it is old. In June 1998, the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, examining nine work-related diving deaths in Alaska between 1990 and 1997, cited a national rate of about 180 deaths per 100,000 full-time commercial divers per year, roughly 40 times the all-worker average, and noted that OSHA had recorded 116 occupational diving fatalities nationally between 1989 and 1997. All nine Alaska deaths were officially drownings, mostly among sea cucumber harvesters and divers clearing fouled fishing gear, with lack of training a recurring factor. That is a real statistic. It is also 28 years old, it predates modern equipment and regulation, and it is dominated by shellfish harvesting rather than offshore construction. Anyone presenting it as today's offshore risk is misusing it.

"You can become an underwater welder by taking a welding course and then a diving course." In Britain, no. HSE states plainly that overseas training does not convert into an HSE qualification, and that to hold one you must be assessed by an HSE-recognised Diver Competence Assessment Organisation. HSE qualifications themselves do not expire, but the diving contractor must still judge whether a diver who has been inactive for years remains competent. The order of operations is: diving qualification first, medical first, welding second.

Is it the most dangerous job in the world?

Almost certainly not, and the available data points the other way.

Source: BLS, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, civilian occupations with high fatal work injury rates, 2023. Commercial divers do not appear in the table. 2023 is the most recent year for which BLS publishes rates for these detailed occupations; in the later CFOI 2024 release of 19 February 2026 the all-worker rate is 3.3 per 100,000, against 5,070 fatal work injuries.

For offshore saturation specifically, the best long-run analysis we have found was prepared by Scandpower for Statoil, Norsk Hydro and Esso and published on 4 August 2005. It records two saturation fatalities in 431,000 Norwegian saturation man-hours during 1974 to 1978, four in 933,000 hours during 1979 to 1983, one in 1,135,000 hours during 1984 to 1988, and then zero across the fifteen years from 1989 to 2003 — 1,475,000 man-hours without a death. The last recorded saturation fatality in Norwegian waters was in 1987. For the UK and Norway combined over 1990 to 2003, across 10,940,379 saturation man-hours and three UK fatalities, the study's central estimate was a fatal accident rate of 27 per 100 million hours, which it converted to an individual risk of roughly 0.0005 per diver-year.

Source: Scandpower Risk Management AS for Statoil, Norsk Hydro and Esso, Analysis of Risk in Manned Underwater Operations, report 27.207.307/R1. The report itself is dated 4 August 2005 on its title page and headers, although the host's filename says 2004.

Roughly 1 in 2,000 per working year, on that estimate, for North Sea saturation. Serious. Comparable to the worst conventional construction trades. Not one in seven.

The same study estimated inshore professional diving in Norway between 1992 and 2003 at about 1.5 in 1,000 fatalities per diver-year, three times the saturation figure — which matches the pattern in the MMWR data and in HSE's own safety bulletins. The dangerous end of this trade is not the deep offshore end with the chambers, the supervisors and the audit trail. It is shallow, unregulated, small-boat work.

Source: eCFR, 29 CFR Part 1910 Subpart T, Commercial Diving Operations.

The qualification route, country by country

The depth you are allowed to work to is set by regulation, not by ambition.

Sources: eCFR, 29 CFR 1910 Subpart T, sections 1910.424 to 1910.427; HSE, Diving FAQs, updated 26 February 2026.

United States. The dominant private standard is the ADCI Consensus Standards. Its sixth edition, published 2011, required 625 hours of formal instruction for an entry-level tender/diver card, and 625 hours plus 100 field days and 30 working dives for an air diver card. A working dive must include at least 20 minutes of bottom time, dives must fall within the 24 months before the card is issued, and the minimum age for a commercial diver card is 18. Medical examinations are required initially and annually.

Source: ADCI, International Consensus Standards for Commercial Diving Operations, 6th edition (2011). Check ADCI for the current edition before relying on these figures.

Great Britain. Four HSE qualifications exist: SCUBA, Surface Supplied, Surface Supplied Top Up and Closed Bell. All but Closed Bell are limited to 50 metres. You also need a current certificate of medical fitness from an HSE Approved Medical Examiner of Divers, normally valid for 12 months, and offshore divers must be at least 18 and first-aid qualified. HSE's List of Approved Diving Qualifications, approved under regulation 14(1) of the Diving at Work Regulations 1997 and dated 1 January 2026, sets out which foreign certificates are accepted for which class of work — and in some cases attaches conditions, for example that Spanish qualifications are recognised from 1 January 2025 only where the diver also holds an HSE Top Up.

Sources: HSE, Careers in diving, updated 21 May 2026; HSE, List of Approved Diving Qualifications, 1 January 2026.

Becoming a saturation welder. The honest route is long: an offshore surface-supplied qualification, time in the water, then closed bell. DEEP's course requires an approved surface-supplied qualification to 50 metres held for at least 12 months, a valid medical, first aid, and a logged record of dives and bottom time since qualifying. Only then does hyperbaric welding become a possibility, and it is assigned by the contractor to divers who have already proven themselves. Our school directory and the jobs and crewing agencies page are the practical starting points.

So is it worth it?

Set out the arithmetic honestly and decide for yourself.

You will spend somewhere between €5,900 and US$34,850 depending on the route, plus living costs for the duration and a medical you must keep renewing annually. In exchange you enter an occupation of about 4,000 jobs in the United States with 400 openings a year, in which the median earner makes US$72,990 and the median former student of the best-documented school was on US$62,489 a decade after enrolling. The day rates are genuinely excellent — US$141.82 an hour all-in on a Californian public works job — and the number of days is genuinely limited.

It is worth it if you want a trade with real skill in it, you are prepared to tend for a year or two before you dive, you will travel to where the work is, and you treat welding as one of several capabilities alongside inspection, afloat repair and NDT. Those are the people who end up in the top quartile at US$101,550 and above.

It is not worth it if you are going because you read that underwater welders make US$300,000, or because you want to weld and someone told you that doing it underwater pays five times more. The first is false. The second is true only on the few days a year when there is a weld to make, and the person making it has usually been diving for a decade first. For a wider look at pay across the trade, see what commercial divers are paid.

Sources

1. O*NET OnLine — National wages, 49-9092.00 Commercial Divers (BLS 2025 wage data), consulted 8 October 2026.
2. O*NET OnLine — National wages, 51-4121.00 Welders, Cutters, Solderers and Brazers (BLS 2025 wage data), 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 — Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2023: 51-4121 Welders, Cutters, Solderers and Brazers, last modified 3 April 2024, consulted 8 October 2026.
5. O*NET OnLine — National employment trends, Commercial Divers (BLS 2025–2035 projections), consulted 8 October 2026.
6. O*NET OnLine — Commercial Divers: occupation details, tasks and reported job titles, consulted 8 October 2026.
7. O*NET OnLine — National certifications for Commercial Divers, consulted 8 October 2026.
8. US Bureau of Labor Statistics — Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries: civilian occupations with high fatal work injury rates, 2023, consulted 8 October 2026.
9. CDC — Deaths Associated with Occupational Diving, Alaska 1990–1997, MMWR 47(22), 12 June 1998, consulted 8 October 2026.
10. US Department of Education — College Scorecard (institution-level tuition, completion and earnings data, queried via the College Scorecard API), consulted 8 October 2026.
11. Divers Institute of Technology — Financial Aid and programme cost, page last modified 24 September 2026, consulted 8 October 2026.
12. Andark Diving & Watersports — HSE SCUBA training course, page last modified 13 August 2026, consulted 8 October 2026.
13. BIM / National Fisheries College of Ireland — Surface Supplied Diving Operations (QQI Level 6), consulted 8 October 2026.
14. DEEP — HSE Closed Bell Diver course, consulted 8 October 2026.
15. HSE — Careers in diving, updated 21 May 2026, consulted 8 October 2026.
16. HSE — Diving: frequently asked questions, updated 26 February 2026, consulted 8 October 2026.
17. HSE — Diver competence assessment organisations, updated 26 February 2026, consulted 8 October 2026.
18. HSE — List of Approved Diving Qualifications, approved under regulation 14(1) of the Diving at Work Regulations 1997, dated 1 January 2026, consulted 8 October 2026.
19. eCFR — 29 CFR Part 1910 Subpart T, Commercial Diving Operations (OSHA), consulted 8 October 2026.
20. ADCI — International Consensus Standards for Commercial Diving Operations, 6th edition (2011), consulted 8 October 2026.
21. Fair Work Ombudsman — Pay guide, Professional Diving Industry (Industrial) Award MA000108, published 25 June 2025, rates effective 1 July 2025, consulted 8 October 2026.
22. California Department of Industrial Relations — Prevailing wage determination SD-23-31-4-2025-2, Engineering Construction, San Diego County, issued 22 August 2025, consulted 8 October 2026.
23. 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.
24. National Careers Service (UK) — Diver job profile, consulted 8 October 2026.
25. gov.uk — Immigration Rules Appendix Skilled Occupations (going rates, codes 5319 and 5213), consulted 8 October 2026.
26. RMT — Offshore divers win substantial pay deal, 15 August 2024, consulted 8 October 2026.
27. Havtilsynet (Norwegian Ocean Industry Authority) — Diving report for 2025, 29 January 2026, consulted 8 October 2026.
28. Scandpower Risk Management AS — Analysis of Risk in Manned Underwater Operations, report 27.207.307/R1, for Statoil, Norsk Hydro and Esso, 4 August 2005, consulted 8 October 2026.
29. American Welding Society — D3.6M:2017 Underwater Welding Code (scope and list price), consulted 8 October 2026.
30. American Welding Society — D3.6M:1999 Specification for Underwater Welding (historical, includes Class C), consulted 8 October 2026.
31. ANSI — Underwater Welding Code AWS D3.6M:2017, consulted 8 October 2026.
32. TWI — What standards are applicable to underwater manual metal arc welding?, consulted 8 October 2026.
33. TWI — Underwater wet welding: steel with carbon equivalent up to 0.40 using rutile and oxyrutile electrodes, Member Report 1066/2016 (M. Consonni), summary, consulted 8 October 2026.
34. J. Łabanowski, D. Fydrych, G. Rogalski — Underwater Welding: A Review, Advances in Materials Science 8(3), December 2008, consulted 8 October 2026.
35. O*NET OnLine — Summary report for 49-9092.00 Commercial Divers, consulted 8 October 2026.

Frequently asked questions