The Trades, One by One
Do Electricians Really Make 100,000 Dollars?
Some do, and most do not. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median wage for electricians at 62,350 dollars a year, with the bottom ten percent under 39,430 and the top ten percent above 106,030, all for the May 2024 reference period. So a six figure electrician is real and is roughly the top decile, not the typical worker. The honest answer to the question is a distribution, and the useful question is what moves a person along it.
What does BLS actually say an electrician earns?
One number gets quoted and it is the wrong shape. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a median, a bottom decile and a top decile for electricians, and the three of them together are the real answer.
| Where a person sits | Annual wage, BLS May 2024 |
|---|---|
| Bottom 10 percent | Less than $39,430 |
| Median, the middle electrician | $62,350 |
| Top 10 percent | More than $106,030 |
All three figures are from the same BLS reference period, May 2024. BLS also publishes the median as an hourly figure, $29.98 an hour, for the same period. Do not multiply one into the other and do not blend the bottom decile with the median to invent a starting wage. They are separate published points on one curve.
So the six figure electrician exists. He or she is somewhere in the top ten percent of the trade, which is a real place that real people get to, and is not where anyone starts.
Where does the 100,000 dollar claim come from, then?
Two places, and only one of them is honest.
The honest one is the 90th percentile above. If a family friend clears six figures wiring commercial buildings, that friend is in the top decile of a large occupation. BLS counted 818,700 electricians in 2024, so the top ten percent is tens of thousands of people. Nothing about it is a myth.
The dishonest one is the journeyman figure. You will see pages quoting a specific journeyman electrician salary and citing BLS underneath it. BLS does not publish a wage by licence level. The $62,350 median for May 2024 covers apprentices, journeymen and masters in a single number, so a journeyman rate sourced to BLS has been made up. Actual journeyman scales are set in local agreements, they differ enormously between one metro area and the next, and they are not a national statistic. That is a good thing to know before your teenager quotes one at the dinner table.
What actually moves a person up that curve?
Five things do most of the work, and none of them is a trick.
Where you work. The median is national. Wages for the same licence and the same skills differ between a dense metro market and a rural county, and BLS’s national figure smooths all of that away. The local number is the one that matters to your household, and it is found through the union local or the state’s prevailing wage determinations, not through a national median.
Hours. Wage data describes pay, and overtime is hours. Construction work is not evenly spread across the year, and a shutdown, a data centre build or a storm restoration season can put a lot of hours in front of somebody who wants them. This is the least glamorous route into the upper part of the distribution and the most common.
The licence. BLS states plainly that most states require electricians to pass a test and be licensed, and that requirements vary by state. The licence is what lets a person work without someone else signing for it, and it is the gate between helping and being responsible. Licensing: what your state does and does not require covers how to find yours.
Running work. Foreman, general foreman, estimator, project manager. This is the step where somebody stops being paid for their own hands and starts being paid for a crew’s output. It is also the step that has nothing to do with tools and everything to do with paperwork, scheduling and reading people, which is worth telling a sixteen year old who thinks the trade is only the physical part.
Ownership. A person who owns a contracting business is not really described by an occupational wage at all. The upside is genuinely uncapped and so is the downside, and BLS’s occupational median was never built to answer that question. Treat any figure that claims to be an owner’s income with the same suspicion you would treat any other business income claim.
How does that compare to going the degree route?
Fairly, and the site is not going to pretend otherwise. Using BLS medians from the same May 2024 cycle, so the comparison is legitimate: electrical engineers had a median of $111,910 and a 90th percentile above $175,460. Electricians had a median of $62,350 and a 90th percentile above $106,030. The engineering path pays more at the middle and at the top.
What it does not do is pay while you learn it. The electrical apprenticeship is paid work from the first week, and BLS lists the typical entry level education for electricians as a high school diploma or equivalent, with the training happening on the job. That is the trade off in one sentence: a lower median against no tuition and four or five years of earning. Which side of it suits your teenager is a judgement about them, not about the numbers.
There is also a trade on the same BLS list that out earns both at the entry credential level. Electrical power line installers and repairers had a BLS median of $92,560 in May 2024 with a typical entry requirement of a high school diploma. BLS also records their fatal injury rate at 13.8 per 100,000 full time equivalent workers in 2024, against 5.3 for electricians. Never look at the first number without the second.
Is the demand there to support any of this?
BLS projects employment of electricians to grow 9 percent from 2024 to 2034, an increase of about 77,400 jobs over that decade, and about 81,000 openings a year on average across the same decade once workers who retire or leave the trade are counted. The larger shortage headlines you will see in trade press are industry hiring need estimates rather than BLS projections, and the two cannot be added together. How to read a career growth statistic takes that apart properly.
What this looks like
Kendra is an illustration, not a real person, and every figure attached to her is a published BLS figure rather than a promise.
She starts a registered electrical apprenticeship at nineteen. BLS describes the usual structure as a four or five year programme with roughly 2,000 hours of paid on the job training each year plus classroom instruction, so she is earning from the start and paying no tuition. Her pay in year one is a fraction of the journeyman rate in her area and steps up on a schedule written into her programme’s own standards.
When she finishes and passes her state’s exam, she is somewhere inside the BLS distribution and nobody can tell her in advance where. If she lands near the middle, that is $62,350 in May 2024 terms. If her local market pays above the national median, or she takes the overtime, or she moves up to running work, she moves toward the $106,030 line. If she does none of those, she does not.
Six years in, the question that decides her income is not really about wiring. It is whether she wants to run a crew, sit an estimating desk, or keep her tools and take the hours. All three are respectable and only two of them pay like the top decile.
The sentence to give your teenager
Electricians can make a hundred thousand dollars, and the middle electrician makes about sixty two thousand. Both of those are BLS figures for May 2024, and the gap between them is a career’s worth of decisions about location, hours, licensing and responsibility. Anyone selling the first number without the second is selling something.
Questions parents keep asking
Is there a BLS number for what a journeyman electrician makes?
No. BLS does not publish a wage by licence level. The 62,350 dollar median for May 2024 covers apprentices, journeymen and masters in one figure, so any journeyman rate attributed to BLS has been invented somewhere along the way. Real journeyman scales are set in local collective bargaining agreements and vary a lot by area. Look up the scale for your own region through the local union hall or your state’s prevailing wage determinations rather than trusting a national figure.
Do apprentices get paid while they train?
Yes, in a registered apprenticeship. BLS describes the usual route as a four or five year apprenticeship in which apprentices typically receive 2,000 hours of paid on the job training a year plus technical instruction. Pay starts well below the journeyman rate and steps up as skill is acquired. The exact schedule is written into each programme’s own standards, so ask to see it. More on the application in how to apply for an electrical apprenticeship.
Does my teen need a licence to earn that money?
In most places, eventually. BLS says most states require electricians to pass a test and be licensed, and that requirements vary by state. That is not the same as every state, and cities sometimes license separately from the state. Start with what your state does and does not require.
Is there a trade that pays more than electrical work?
On the BLS list this site covers, yes: electrical power line installers and repairers had a median of 92,560 dollars in May 2024, with a typical entry requirement of a high school diploma. It is also one of the higher fatality rate occupations BLS tracks, at 13.8 deaths per 100,000 full time equivalent workers in 2024. Read the pay and the risk together in which trades are actually dangerous.
Will these numbers change?
Yes, every year. Every wage figure on this page is the May 2024 reference period from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, and BLS refreshes that cycle annually. If you are reading a wage number anywhere online without a reference period attached, you do not know what year you are looking at.
The long version, for the teenager
Career Planning for Teens
Thirty-five short chapters that walk a teenager from narrowing down a trade to getting accepted onto an apprenticeship and reaching a first wage without borrowing against it. Written to be read alone, at around age 13 to 17.
Jenna Hale writes this site and wrote that book, so read this as the author pointing at her own work. Nothing here is held back for it: the page is the whole answer, the book is the same ground at a teenager's pace.