How Much Do Electricians Make? Pay by Tier, Segment, Union Status and State

Electricians (SOC 47-2111) had a median wage of $30.38 an hour — $63,190 a year — in the May 2025 OEWS release, with 757,220 electricians employed nationally.

A median is a midpoint: half of employed electricians earned more than that, half earned less.

The spread around it is wide.

At the 10th percentile the wage was $20.50 an hour ($42,640 a year); at the 90th percentile it was $52.17 ($108,510).

One in ten electricians earned below the low figure and one in ten above the high one, on straight-time wages.

For calibration, the median across all U.S. occupations in the same release was $50,980 a year ($24.51 an hour), so the electrician median sits clearly above it.

Read the fine print before quoting any of it.

OEWS covers wage-and-salary employees and excludes the self-employed; the percentile figures are straight-time pay; and the whole series is one occupation code — apprentices, journeymen, masters, residential, commercial and service electricians all sit inside 47-2111, which is why the rest of this page takes the pay drivers apart one at a time.

One forward-looking marker: BLS's Occupational Outlook Handbook carries the same $63,190 May 2025 median and projects employment of electricians to grow 9 percent from 2025 to 2035, with about 72,700 openings a year on average.

The honest starting point is that BLS publishes no apprentice, journeyman or master wage.

OEWS folds every tier into one occupation, so any "apprentice electrician salary" or "master electrician salary" figure sourced to BLS is a misreading — and the 10th-percentile wage ($42,640) sometimes gets presented as apprentice pay, which it is not: it covers everyone in the occupation.

What federal rules do set is the shape of apprentice pay, not a number.

Registered apprenticeship standards must include "a progressively increasing schedule of wages to be paid to the apprentice consistent with the skill acquired," and the entry wage may not be less than the minimum wage prescribed by the Fair Labor Standards Act unless other law or a collective bargaining agreement requires more — that is 29 CFR 29.5(b)(5), the rule for programs registered with the Department of Labor's apprenticeship system.

The percentage steps themselves are each program's to set.

Two IBEW agreements show how differently programs draw the same ladder.

Under the Local 11 (Los Angeles) inside wiremen agreement, in the printed term that ran January 26 through June 30, 2026, apprentices moved through ten periods from 40% of the journeyman rate ($26.00) to 85% ($55.25), two periods a year over five years.

The Local 340 (Sacramento) inside agreement instead runs five periods at 45%, 50%, 60%, 70% and 80% of journeyman, advancing at 0, 2,000, 3,500, 5,000 and 6,500 on-the-job hours plus completed schooling, with the full rate arriving at 8,000 hours and fifth-year schooling in that program.

In both schedules the step to full journeyman rate is the largest single raise on the ladder — the apprentice pay steps page follows how schedules like these advance.

Above journeyman, the license ladder keeps shaping pay indirectly.

BLS publishes no journeyman or master series to compare, so we have no verified national second-license premium to quote.

What a master license changes is structural rather than measured — how the second license bears on contracting is licensing territory, and no federal wage figure attaches to it; confirm that side with your state electrical licensing board.

The journeyman salary and master salary pages carry the federal series and what it can and can't say about each tier.

Start with the caveat that decides what can honestly be said: BLS has no residential, commercial, industrial or service electrician series — every electrician sits inside SOC 47-2111.

The closest federal lens is the industry that employs you, and that lens is heavily concentrated: electrical contractors and other wiring installation contractors employed about 541,390 of the 757,220 electricians in the May 2025 data — roughly 71% — in an industry category OEWS does not split into residential versus commercial work.

The two cells BLS does publish for builder-employed electricians are small and nearly identical: $30.57 an hour ($63,580 a year, 4,310 employed) in residential building construction and $30.77 ($64,010, 14,670) in nonresidential building construction.

Both cover only electricians on builders' own payrolls — they are not "residential electrician pay," and treating the first cell as that figure is an easy misread of this data.

Where the industry cells do separate, the gaps are real:

• Manufacturing — $35.84 an hour ($74,550 a year), 52,590 employed: the plant and industrial-maintenance world.
• Electric power generation, transmission and distribution — $51.27 ($106,640), 7,950 employed: utility-side work.
• Local government — $39.48 ($82,120), 15,330 employed: institutional and facilities positions.

So the defensible read is about setting, not labels.

Electricians inside plants, utilities and public institutions earned clearly more than the builder-employed cells in the same release, while the residential-versus-commercial distinction barely registers in the data at all.

How a given posting prices a segment still comes down to the license class it requires, the local market and the work mix — the federal series can frame that, not settle it.

No one can quote a verified national "union electrician wage": OEWS does not split union from non-union pay, and BLS publishes no electrician-specific union membership rate.

What it does publish is occupation groups, and those numbers are worth knowing.

On membership: 10.0% of U.S. wage and salary workers belonged to a union in 2025 — 14.7 million workers.

Within construction and extraction occupations, 16.4% were union members (17.4% were represented by a union); in installation, maintenance and repair occupations, 12.5% and 13.6%.

On earnings: among full-time construction and extraction workers in 2025, union members' median usual weekly earnings were $1,561 against $1,004 for nonunion workers, with the group as a whole at $1,096.

That figure comes from a different survey than the wage data earlier on this page, so the two do not line up row for row — and BLS itself cautions that the union-nonunion difference reflects coverage by a collective bargaining agreement and "a variety of factors," including how workers distribute across occupations, industries, ages, firm sizes and regions.

Read it as a group-level pattern, not a causal premium for electricians.

The verified union pay figures at trade level in this research are the locals' own published wage sheets.

Across four inside wireman sheets from 2025–2026, journeyman base rates ran from $53.70 (IBEW Local 340, Sacramento) to $65.00 (Local 11, Los Angeles), with Local 440 (Riverside) at $57.26 and the Local 3 White Plains agreement at $58.75 — and every sheet adds the National Electrical Benefit Fund (NEBF) at 3% of gross.

That is a four-sheet sample, not a ranking and not a national average; Local 11's printed term ran through June 30, 2026, so its figure belongs to that term rather than to today.

Two more parts of the package sit off the base rate.

Benefits differ: in private industry generally, 92% of union workers had access to employer medical care against 69% of nonunion workers, and 91% versus 70% for retirement benefits, in the March 2026 federal survey.

And union pay nets out working dues, which differ by local — 3.5% of gross under the Local 11 sheet, and 5% under Local 440's bulletin, which is in force through November 30, 2026.

No national statistic answers this one directly: OEWS figures are straight-time wage-and-salary pay, so overtime premiums and per-diem arrangements sit on top of every BLS number you have read so far, not inside them.

What the verified record does show is the mechanism, from three California-area agreements the research read:

• IBEW Local 340 (Sacramento), inside agreement effective June 1, 2026 and running to May 31, 2030: overtime at $80.55 an hour and double time at $107.40, against the $53.70 journeyman base.
• IBEW Local 11 (Los Angeles), printed term January 26 to June 30, 2026: swing shift at the wage plus 17.3% and graveyard plus 31.4%, with double time after 10 hours on weekdays and after 10 hours on Saturday.
• Travel terms — Local 340 pays $9.00–$13.00 daily travel pay for jobs 40–65 miles outside its free zone, and on jobs requiring lodging the employer furnishes meals and lodging with $60.00 a day as the minimum ($30.00 on the first and last day); Local 440's bulletin pays $19.00 an hour in travel and subsistence for zone B work.

Those are the terms of three agreements, not norms — but they show what to look for.

Premium structures, shift differentials and per-diem terms are negotiated document by document, and they change how a posting's headline rate converts into a take-home number.

When you weigh a travel or heavy-overtime role against a local one, price the package: the base rate, the premium rules, the per diem, and how much of each kind of hour the work actually involves.

Unlike tier or union status, location is a split the federal data does publish.

In the May 2025 state figures, Oregon had the highest annual median at $101,310 — the only state above $100,000 — and Arkansas the lowest at $49,070.

These are medians by state in a single release, not adjusted for cost of living; the full state-by-state table sits on the electrician salary data page.

Medians and top ends rank differently, which matters if you are chasing the high end: California, outside the top 10 by median, had the highest state 90th-percentile wage, at $140,340.

Specialties are harder to price, because the federal data has no specialty series for electricians — every one sits inside 47-2111 — and published no data-center electrician estimate in the May 2025 release.

The neighboring specialties BLS does track as their own occupations carry their own medians: security and fire alarm systems installers (SOC 49-2098) at $28.88 an hour ($60,070 a year), and solar photovoltaic installers (SOC 47-2231) at $25.55 ($53,140).

Those are different occupations with their own survey lines, not electrician subtotals — treat any "specialty electrician" wage you see quoted as an estimate until you can see its source.

Postings are where all of this gets concrete.

On electrician jobs you can filter by posted pay band and compare how each opening presents its package — hourly against annual, base rate against rate-plus-per-diem, and which license class the employer asks for — the same variables this page has broken out.

When you compare offers, price the structure rather than the headline number: the base rate against your license tier, the segment and its overtime expectations, the local market, and the negotiated extras — premiums, shift differentials, per diem, employer-paid contributions — from the sections above.

If you are early in the trade, the most reliable raise on the ladder is the one written into apprenticeship schedules: documented hours and schooling that step you toward full journeyman rate.

The electrician career guide covers the ladder itself, tier by tier.

Career and job-search information, not licensing, legal or financial advice. Wage figures are BLS OEWS May 2025 unless another source is named; apprenticeship wage schedules are set by each program under Department of Labor rules. Confirm licensing questions with your state electrical licensing board, and program terms with the program itself.