Thinking about leaving a desk job for a trade? What the pay data says

The median elevator installer in the US earns $109,910 a year (BLS OEWS, May 2025). No four-year degree. No tuition debt. That's the number to sit with if you're at a desk right now doing the math on a career change.

A lot of office workers are eyeing the trades right now. You've probably seen the conversation — software, marketing, admin roles getting squeezed, and people wondering whether hands-on, on-site work is the safer bet. We're not going to put a number on that trend, because we don't have one. We don't have data on how many people are actually making this switch — what we DO have is the pay data for where they'd land. So let's stay on solid ground and talk about that.

The number that surprises people first: elevator installers

Start with the high end, because it's the one nobody expects. Elevator and escalator installers and repairers median $109,910 a year (BLS OEWS, May 2025). That's a national median — the middle of the trade, not the top.

Compare that to a salary you already know. If you're a mid-career office worker, $109,910 is in the same neighborhood as plenty of white-collar roles that took a bachelor's degree and four years of student loans to reach. The elevator tech got there through an apprenticeship — paid the whole way.

It's a smaller trade with a tighter door to get through, so it's not a "just sign up" path. But it tells you the ceiling in the trades is higher than the desk-job conversation usually admits. Look at the full picture on the elevator installer salary page.

The everyday trades: a real, livable median

Most people don't land in the highest-paying corner of the trades, so let's be honest about the middle. Here's where the common trades sit nationally (BLS OEWS, May 2025):

Trade	National median
Elevator installer	$109,910
Electrical power line worker	$95,320
Plumber	$63,800
Electrician	$63,190

The $63,190 electrician median and the $63,800 plumber median aren't six figures. But they're a real, livable wage you reach without a four-year degree or the debt that comes with it. And the power line worker median of $95,320 sits well above the typical desk-job paycheck — that's the trade that keeps the grid running.

Here's the part that matters if you're comparing against a salary you already have: the trades median is the middle, and the spread above it is wide. The ceiling is set by your state and your specialty, not by a degree.

Geography is part of the pay

The same trade pays very differently depending on where you do it. For electricians, Illinois medians $99,560 and Washington medians $95,220 (BLS OEWS, May 2025) — both clearing the national median by more than $30,000 for the same license and the same code book.

So the honest framing isn't "the trades pay $63K." It's: a real median in the low $60s, a high ceiling in the right state or the right specialty, and a path in that doesn't cost you tuition. If you're weighing that against a desk salary you already know, those are the three numbers to put side by side.

You can compare across all the trades we track on the trades directory, and dig into any single one on its electrician salary page or the others linked there.

The part that's actually different from college: how you get in

If you switch to a trade, you don't pay to learn it. You get paid to learn it.

That's the structure of an apprenticeship: earn-while-you-learn, on-the-job hours plus classroom time, and you draw a paycheck the whole way through. There's no four-year tuition bill and no loan balance waiting on the other side. For someone leaving a desk job — especially someone who already carries student debt from the first degree — that's a meaningfully different math than "go back to school."

We're not going to hand you a fake "apprentices earn $X" figure here, because the exact dollars depend on the trade, the region, and the year of the contract. The general, true thing holds: it's paid, and it doesn't put you in debt. Start with how apprenticeships work.

Where the data goes quiet

Here's where we keep ourselves honest, because the limits of what we know matter as much as the numbers.

We don't have data on the career switch itself. No migration rate, no count of office workers moving into the trades, no trade-school enrollment trend. The AI-and-white-collar conversation is real and a lot of people are having it — but we're not going to attach a percentage to it that we can't source. The career-switch angle is context. The pay figures are the sourced part. Keep those two separate in your head and you won't get sold a story.

We're not claiming the trades are "AI-proof." Nobody can promise that about any job. What's true, and plainly so, is that this work is hands-on and on-site — you can't wire a panel, set an elevator, or run a gas line from a laptop in another country. That's a description of the work, not a guarantee about the future. Take it as exactly that much.

These medians are nominal. BLS gives us the wage; it doesn't adjust for what your rent does to it. Illinois pays an electrician more than most states, but a dollar stretches differently in Chicago than in a small town. We don't have a cost-of-living dataset ingested, so we won't pretend to adjust for one.

What to do with this

If you're seriously weighing the switch, don't decide on the vibe of the trend. Decide on the numbers. Pull the median for the specific trade and state you're considering, put it next to your current salary, and factor in that the trades path doesn't come with tuition debt. Start at whether a trade is right for you.

If you're trying to pick a trade, look at both the median and the ceiling. A trade with a modest national median can still pay six figures in the right state or specialty — the trades directory is the place to compare them honestly.

And if you've already made a move like this, or you're in the trades now, add your pay. We publish anonymously, never with a raw email address, and every real number makes the next person's decision a little less of a guess.

Data: BLS OEWS, May 2025. Figures are national annual median wages by occupation (and state medians for electricians). The career-switch trend is context, not data we hold — the pay figures above are the sourced part. See how we build these numbers.