Apprentice Wage Progression

Why this tool is empty when you arrive

Every other page on this subject opens with a number: apprentices start at some share of journeyworker scale and step up at some fixed interval. You have read a version of it a dozen times, and in a great many programs something like it is what happens.

It is still not a fact you can cite, and this page will not print a figure as though it were one. Federal regulation at 29 CFR 29.5(b)(5) requires a program’s standards to contain a progressively increasing schedule of wages consistent with the skill acquired, with an entry wage not less than the minimum wage prescribed by the Fair Labor Standards Act where applicable, unless a higher wage is required by other federal law, state law or a collective bargaining agreement. That is the entire federal rule on the subject. There is no percentage in it. DOL’s own sample standards template shows the mechanism, describing a progressive wage schedule as an increasing percentage of the skilled journeyworker rate, and then leaves the numbers for the program to fill in.

So the percentages are real, and they are local. They live in the standards of the specific program your teenager is applying to, and there is no national version of them. A prefilled box here would be a guess that looked like an authority, and a parent would then negotiate against it.

What the tool does with your numbers

You give it the journeyworker hourly scale from your local, and the percentage for each step from the standards. It multiplies. That is genuinely all it does, and the reason it is worth doing is that seeing the whole schedule at once is different from reading it as a column of percentages.

Add the length of each step, in hours or in months, and it totals them and tells you what they come to, which is a useful cross-check against the term the standards state elsewhere. If the step lengths do not add up to the term, you are either reading two different documents or a step has gone missing, and either is worth a question.

Add a weekly hours figure and it will produce weekly and annual columns, and it will remind you every time that those columns rest on an assumption you made rather than on anything the program promised. Construction hours are not 52 even weeks. Weather, gaps between jobs, unpaid class time and the wait for a first dispatch all sit between the hourly rate and the tax return.

If a step you have entered is not higher than the one before it, the tool says so, because a schedule that goes sideways or backwards does not match what 29 CFR 29.5(b)(5) requires and that is worth raising before anyone signs anything.

How to get the written standards

This is the practical half of the page, and it is short.

Ask the sponsor directly, and ask by name: may I see the program standards, including the wage progression schedule and the outline of work processes. Both are required contents under 29 CFR 29.5(b), so a genuinely registered program has them on file. In a joint apprenticeship and training committee the training director is the person who holds them. In an employer-sponsored program it is usually whoever signs the apprenticeship agreement.

If the sponsor is slow or vague, go around them. A registered apprenticeship is registered with a registration agency, defined at 29 CFR 29.2 as the Office of Apprenticeship or a recognised state apprenticeship agency, and that agency holds the registered standards and can confirm the program is real. Apprenticeship.gov has two tools and they do different jobs: the Apprenticeship Finder lists open apprenticeship job postings you can apply to, and the Partner Finder is the one that searches sponsors, educators and other registered organisations, which is where a contact name comes from. Neither is a substitute for calling the registration agency.

The word apprenticeship is not legally protected in ordinary commercial use, which is the part most parents do not know. Any employer may call an unstructured helper job an apprenticeship. Registration is what buys the written agreement, the defined term, the work process outline, the related instruction, the progressive wage schedule, agency oversight, and, for a 16 or 17 year old, eligibility for the hazardous occupations exemption that the work rules tool explains. An unregistered program offers none of it.

A worked example

Junie is 19 and has an offer from a program she likes. Her father asks for the standards, gets them, and types the schedule into this page. The figures are hers and the example is illustrative.

What surprises them is not the starting rate. It is the shape. Laid out as bars, the first two steps sit far below the journeyworker line and the last two sit close to it, and the distance between step one and step two is smaller than the distance between step five and step six. That tells them something about when the money actually arrives in this particular program, which is later than they had assumed, and it changes the household planning conversation more than the headline starting figure did.

Then the step lengths do not add up to the stated term. One line is missing from the copy they were given. They call the training director, get the complete schedule, and the question turns out to be nothing. Asking it was still the right move.

What this tool cannot do

It cannot tell you what a program pays, because it has no data of its own. It cannot tell you whether the schedule you were shown is the current one, which is a question for the registration agency. It cannot tell you whether the local is dispatching work, which is the difference between a wage schedule and an income. And it cannot tell you whether your teenager will finish: the last national completion rate DOL published in a citable document was 46 percent for fiscal year 2014, and DOL’s more recent figures live on an interactive dashboard rather than in a quotable document.

What it can do is turn a page of percentages into a picture, and give you two or three specific questions to take back to the person who wrote them.