How much do millwrights make in Colorado in 2026?

The median millwright salary in Colorado is $81,440 a year, which works out to roughly $39.15 an hour based on a standard 2,080-hour work year. That figure comes from BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics data released in May 2025. It sits well above the national median for many construction trades, reflecting Colorado's active mining, energy, and manufacturing sectors that keep millwrights busy year-round.

Pay spreads fairly wide across the state. Workers at the 25th percentile earn $67,340 annually, or about $32.38 an hour — that typically means someone early in their career or working for a smaller contractor in a less industrial part of the state. The 75th percentile lands at $83,600, around $40.19 an hour. The gap between the 25th and 75th percentile is $16,260 a year. That spread tells you experience and employer type matter a lot in this trade — more than in trades where pay is compressed.

Millwrights in Colorado do a wide range of work: installing, aligning, and dismantling heavy industrial machinery in refineries, paper mills, power plants, cement plants, and food processing facilities. The Front Range corridor — from Pueblo north through Denver and into Fort Collins — has the densest concentration of industrial employers. Workers based near Pueblo or Greeley, where agriculture-related processing plants operate, often find steady local work without chasing project to project. Denver metro and the northern suburbs also have significant demand tied to manufacturing expansion and data center construction, where precision machinery installation is part of the scope.

Mountain and Western Slope assignments can pay more on a per-project basis when employers need to attract workers away from the Front Range, but those gigs can also be irregular. A millwright willing to travel or live in camp during a turnaround at a remote facility often sees overtime that pushes total annual earnings well above the BLS median, which captures base wages and does not reflect overtime premium, per diem, or travel pay.

Speaking of overtime: millwrights routinely work planned outages and turnarounds that involve 10- to 12-hour days, seven days a week, for weeks at a stretch. At the median straight-time rate of $39.15, a single 80-hour week with all overtime at time-and-a-half adds roughly $588 over a standard 40-hour week's pay. A month of turnaround work can move an annual income well past the 75th percentile figure even for someone whose base rate is near the median.

Apprenticeship is the most direct path into the trade. A four- or five-year millwright apprenticeship combines on-the-job hours with related technical instruction covering rigging, precision alignment, hydraulics, and blueprint reading. Apprentice wages start well below the journeyman rate and step up each year. By the final year of an apprenticeship, an apprentice in Colorado is typically earning close to or at the journey-level rate. New entrants who skip formal apprenticeship sometimes come in through related backgrounds — heavy equipment maintenance, pipefitting, or machinist work — and may need additional time before their wages reach the median.

Some millwrights in Colorado work under collective bargaining agreements. If you are covered by one, your base rate, overtime rules, and benefit contributions are spelled out in that agreement. If you are unsure whether a specific project or employer is covered, ask your steward or check the agreement directly — do not rely on any third-party wage estimate, including BLS figures, for what your actual rate should be on a union job.

The BLS numbers here capture wages as of May 2025. They include full-time and part-time workers, union and non-union, across all employer sizes. They do not capture per diem, travel pay, health and pension benefit contributions, or shift differentials. A millwright earning $39.15 an hour on paper could have a total compensation package worth considerably more when benefits are factored in — or considerably less if they are working sporadic project work without benefits.

To push your pay toward or past the 75th percentile mark of $40.19 an hour, the most reliable levers are precision alignment certification (laser alignment and vibration analysis credentials are valued by industrial employers), experience on specific machinery types like turbines or large compressors, and a track record on high-pressure turnarounds where reliability and speed matter. Millwrights who can supervise and manage a small crew also tend to move past the median faster than those who stay in a pure wrench-turning role.