Salary guides · Updated weekly
Pick your trade and your state and see the real hourly bands by level, what every ticket in your pocket is worth, and whether the rate you're on right now is fair. Nothing here is a job ad.
Type it or choose from the list below. Aliases work — type sparky or HVAC.
Rates move market by market, so a national average is the least useful number there is.
Hourly by level, what each ticket adds, and whether your own rate is fair.
Same structure for every trade and every state — so you can compare two markets properly.
Real hourly ranges for every level in your state, not a single national average.
Every certification with the rate bump attached, sorted by how fast it pays back.
Enter your rate and see your percentile and what the gap to the median costs you.
The same rate adjusted for local cost of living, so markets compare honestly.
Open a trade to see its salary guide, then narrow it to your state.
There is no single number, and any page offering one has rounded away the part that matters. Trade pay is set by the level you hold, the sector you work in and the market you work in, roughly in that order. A licensed hand in industrial work can earn close to double what an unlicensed one earns in residential service in the same city, for work that looks similar from outside.
Most careers move in small annual increments. The trades do not. Pay sits flat and then jumps at credential events — the journey-level licence above all. Those jumps are functions of documented hours and an exam rather than tenure, which means the timing is largely inside your control, and an annual review is usually the wrong moment to ask.
Trade pay is quoted hourly, so any annual figure depends on the assumption behind it. Ours use 2,080 hours — forty a week across the year. Overtime, shift differentials and per diem then sit on top, and in industrial work they routinely add twenty to forty percent. None of it survives the project ending, which is the argument for prioritising base rate.
Compare against your own level in your own market, not the highest number you have heard on a jobsite. If you sit below the median for both, that is usually a conversation with your current employer before it is a job search — and one worth having with the local band in front of you.
The fastest fix is usually a different employer in the same city. Openings at or above the seventy-fifth percentile, updated weekly.
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