How we build these numbers

Every salary page starts with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program — the May 2025 release. It surveys hundreds of thousands of employers, so it's the most reliable public read on what a trade actually pays in a given state. See the BLS OEWS technical documentation for survey methodology.

We show three numbers from it: the 25th percentile, the median, and the 75th percentile. The median is the middle — half of workers earn more, half earn less. The 25th and 75th show the real range, because a single "average" hides how much experience, license, and the type of work move your pay. Every figure is annual, with the hourly equivalent at 2,080 hours a year.

Where we have it, we add the union journeyman wage — IBEW for electricians, UA for plumbers and pipefitters, from published local agreements. We list the local and mark the figure as approximate, because contracts change and you should verify against the current agreement. The union number is straight base wage; it doesn't count the full package — health, pension, and annuity contributions sit on top of that.

When a union figure exists, we compare it against the BLS all-worker median for the same trade and state so you can see the premium in real dollars, not a vague "unions pay more."

BLS is a year-lagged survey. Workers on the job today know what changed. So anyone can add their pay — anonymously, no account, verified by a one-time email link. We never store your raw email address; we keep only a hashed version of it.

Submissions don't go live unchecked. Each one runs through a plausibility check against the BLS range for that trade and state. Numbers in range publish automatically; outliers are held for review, and anything far above the 75th percentile is flagged so a real person looks before it counts. Garbage in, garbage out — so we guard the gate.

For some trade-and-state combinations, BLS suppresses the estimate because the sample is too small to be reliable. We don't paper over that with a made-up number. Those pages say plainly that the data is limited, then point you to the national median and the same trade's pay in nearby states. If you work that trade there, your submission is exactly what fills the gap.

We report state-level pay, not metro-level — a Houston electrician and an El Paso electrician show up in the same Texas figure today. We don't yet break out apprentice, journeyman, and master tiers beyond the union scale, and we don't track company-specific pay. Those are on the roadmap, and peer submissions are how we get there honestly.