SAFE
Setting stone requires reading an irregular natural material by hand, shaping it with hammer and chisel or wet saw, and fitting each piece into a course that no two jobs repeat — there is no digitizable version of this. AI touches only the paper edges of the trade: takeoffs, material estimates, pattern layout drawings, and bid paperwork. The weak spot is regulatory: unlike electricians, most stonemasons hold no license and carry no personal sign-off liability, so the moat is purely physical skill and demand for custom masonry.
This fall is concentrated in 2020 and has not recovered since.
Median pay $43,280 → $57,390 +6.1% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
-3%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 7,820 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Hard to automate, but shrinking anyway
The work resists current AI, yet the BLS projects -3% by 2034. Whatever is shrinking this occupation, the evidence does not point to automation — demand, demographics, offshoring and industry decline all shrink jobs that no machine could do.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~800 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
MasonRock MasonStonemasonStone LayerStone MasonStone PaverBanker MasonStone SetterMarble SetterGranite SetterMason MechanicMemorial MasonMonument MasonStone RepairerFlagstone LayerMonument SetterStone InstallerCurbstone SetterFormstone FitterMarble InstallerMonument ErectorStone DerrickmanMarble Shop WorkerMonument Installer
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Tasks largely resist digitisation Every stone arrives with a different bed, grain, and fracture line, so the mason judges each piece at the moment of setting — trimming the back of a jamb stone to clear an out-of-plumb wall, feathering a joint to hide a course that drifted a quarter inch over 30 feet — and the only automated slice of the trade is CNC shop fabrication of dimensional pieces, which still needs a human to set and point them on the wall, which is why this sits at 19 rather than the mid-teens of trades where prefab has genuinely displaced field work.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments The work is 100-plus-pound units lifted onto scaffold or setting bed, mortar mixed and struck by hand in whatever weather the pour schedule allows, wet-saw cutting on site, restoration work on parapets and chimney stacks from a swing stage, and repointing in crawl-height crypts and basements — there is no version of this at a screen, hence the ceiling.
Certification preferred, not legally required There is no stonemason license in essentially any state; the general contractor's building permit and the structural engineer's stamp carry the code liability for veneer anchorage and lintel bearing, and what earns the 6 rather than a 0 is that restoration and historic-preservation work often requires documented apprenticeship or NPS/Secretary of the Interior standards competency, plus union certification for many commercial jobs.
Meaningful discretion You decide mortar mix and joint profile to match a 1890s lime-mortar wall, whether a spalling stone is repointed or cut out and replaced, how to shim and bond a course when the substrate is off-layout — real calls with real consequences for water intrusion — but the structural loads, anchor spacing, and flashing details are on someone else's drawings, which is what keeps this at 12 instead of the high teens.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (19/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (6/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (12/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (12/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 30 of this occupation's 69 points (43%).
Embodiment (20/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 84/100, still SAFE.
Growth in the historic-preservation channel where the Secretary of the Interior's Standards and Section 106 review effectively require hand-tooled, in-kind repair — federal/state historic tax credit work already forbids substituting machine-cut or cast substitutes. Wider state historic tax credit programs or landmark district expansion increases the share of work explicitly bought as hand craft.
Adoption in more jurisdictions of mandatory masonry/facade contractor licensing plus a named-inspector sign-off — the concrete precedent is NYC Local Law 11/FISP Facade Inspection Safety Program, where a Qualified Exterior Wall Inspector personally certifies facade repairs, and Chicago's facade ordinance after the 2015 terra cotta fatalities. If a state adopts a masonry specialty license (as Nevada, North Carolina and Virginia already have contractor classifications for masonry) with personal liability for anchorage and veneer attachment, the shield rises.
Insurer or lender requirement that structural stone veneer over a set height be installed and signed off by a certified mason (e.g. MCAA/ICPI-style certification made contractually mandatory in AIA specs or by builders-risk carriers after veneer-detachment claims).
Task-mix shift: as robotic bricklaying (SAM100-type) and CNC stone saws absorb straight-run and repeat-cut work, the residual job concentrates on the calls machines cannot own — reading a defective block, deciding whether a wall gets repointed or rebuilt, matching quarry lots for weathering. Real two-tier structure here.
The limit. Already 69 with task_resistance and embodiment near maximum; realistic headroom is almost entirely in licensing and preservation demand, and the trade's small size (7,820) means no national licensing push is likely to be driven by masons themselves — it would arrive as a byproduct of facade-failure litigation.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 820 | $61,200 +7% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 310 | $61,690 +7% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 230 | $81,730 +42% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 180 | $48,180 -16% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 160 | $61,140 +7% |
| Las Vegas-Henderson-North Las Vegas, NV | 150 | $79,600 +39% |
| Portland-South Portland, ME | 130 | $61,060 +6% |
| Sacramento-Roseville-Folsom, CA | 130 | $58,760 +2% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 230 | $81,730 +42% |
| Las Vegas-Henderson-North Las Vegas, NV | 150 | $79,600 +39% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 110 | $66,790 +16% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 69. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.