How Much Do Apprentice Electricians Make? Year-by-Year Pay

Here is the short answer, using the national numbers. An apprentice electrician starting at half of the journeyman median makes about $31,600 in year one and about $56,900 by year four, and gets paid for every one of those hours.

Apprentice year	Share of journeyman pay	Annual pay	Hourly
Year 1	50%	$31,595	$15.19
Year 2	65%	$41,074	$19.75
Year 3	80%	$50,552	$24.30
Year 4	90%	$56,871	$27.34
Journeyman	100%	$63,190	$30.38

The journeyman line is the BLS OEWS May 2025 national median for electricians, across 757,220 wage and salary workers. The percentages are the progression our model uses, and the hourly column divides by 2,080 hours, the same full-time year BLS uses.

That table is a starting point. Where you live moves year-one pay from about $24,500 to about $50,700, and a real union contract doesn’t follow our tidy percentages at all. Both of those matter more than the national number.

Apprentice Pay Is a Percentage, Not a Paycheck

Nobody hands an apprentice a flat salary. You earn a slice of the journeyman rate, and that slice goes up as you log hours and pass your classroom work.

Entry into the trade is typically a four to five year apprenticeship with about 2,000 hours a year of paid on-the-job training, plus technical instruction in theory, blueprint reading, code, and safety. That’s how BLS describes it, and it matches what I see on my own jobs.

I’ve run kitchen and bathroom remodels in the Pacific Northwest for over 20 years, and an electrician walks onto almost every one of them. When the journeyman shows up with an apprentice, that apprentice is pulling wire, drilling studs, and learning why the old wiring we found behind the plaster has to come out. They’re working, and they’re on the clock for it.

Because the pay is a percentage, two things set your check:

• The journeyman rate in your area. Half of a high rate beats 60 percent of a low one.
• The step schedule in your program. Every program writes its own, and they don’t all start at 50 percent.

A Real Wage Scale: IBEW Local 110

Models are useful. A signed contract is better. Here’s one.

IBEW Local 110 in St. Paul, Minnesota publishes its inside wireman scale. For the 2025-26 contract year (May 1, 2025 through April 30, 2026), the journeyman base rate was $56.80 an hour. Apprentices start at 45 percent, which is $25.56 an hour, and each step requires at least 1,560 hours.

Local 110 step	Share of journeyman	Hourly
Step 1	45%	$25.56
Step 2	55%	$31.24
Step 3	60%	$34.08
Step 4	75%	$42.60
Step 5	85%	$48.28
Journeyman	100%	$56.80

Source: JATC 110 wage scale. Steps 2 through 4 are my math from the published percentages and base rate; steps 1 and 5 are printed on the scale.

Look at that first line. A first-step apprentice at Local 110 made $25.56 an hour, and the national median for fully trained electricians is only about $5 higher, at $30.38. At roughly 2,000 hours a year, $25.56 works out to about $51,000, and that’s the first year of a five-year program.

There’s more. The total package for a Local 110 journeyman was $94.89 an hour, so benefits on top of that $56.80 base are worth a lot of money that never shows up as a wage. Keep that in mind when you compare union and non-union offers side by side.

Don’t read Local 110 as normal, though. The BLS median for all electricians in Minnesota is $78,160, which is about $37.58 an hour. Union inside wiremen in the Twin Cities are working well above their own state’s median, so one contract tells you what’s possible, not what’s typical.

The State Gap: Same Trade, Double the First Check

This is where the national table stops being useful. Here’s our model’s apprentice pay in nine states, each built on that state’s own BLS median.

State	Journeyman median	Year 1 pay	Year 4 pay	First 4 years, after $7,500 training
Oregon	$101,310	$50,655	$91,179	$281,234
Illinois	$99,560	$49,780	$89,604	$276,246
Washington	$95,220	$47,610	$85,698	$263,877
Alaska	$89,440	$44,720	$80,496	$247,404
New York	$78,750	$39,375	$70,875	$216,938
California	$76,160	$38,080	$68,544	$209,556
Texas	$58,570	$29,285	$52,713	$159,425
Florida	$57,250	$28,625	$51,525	$155,663
Arkansas	$49,070	$24,535	$44,163	$132,350

All medians are BLS OEWS May 2025 state figures, not national numbers. Year 1 is 50 percent of the state median and year 4 is 90 percent.

An Oregon first-year apprentice in this model makes $50,655. An Arkansas first-year apprentice makes $24,535. That’s a $26,120 gap in year one, and it compounds every year after.

I’ve lived and worked in Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii, and none of them are cheap places to live. Cost of living explains part of that gap. It doesn’t explain all of it, and you should run your own state before you assume the cheap state comes out even.

One more thing that surprises people. Texas employs 76,770 electricians, more than any other state, and California employs 73,310. Neither shows up near the top of the pay list. The biggest job markets are not the best-paid job markets.

Stack Four Years Against Four Years of School

This is the part that makes the trades-vs-college math so lopsided early on.

Using the national numbers, the four apprentice years in the table above add up to about $180,100 in pay. Take out $7,500 for trade school or pre-apprenticeship, the figure our model charges up front, and the four-year running total comes to $172,592.

A student on the average bachelor’s path spends those same four years at about $15,000 a year in tuition and fees, which is $60,000 out, and graduates owing $37,850 at a 6.39 percent federal rate. At the end of year four, one of those 22-year-olds is up $172,592 and the other is down $60,000 with a loan payment starting.

Our model keeps running for ten years. The national electrician path finishes $271,790 ahead of the average degree path at year ten. Even Arkansas, the lowest-paying state in our data, finishes $131,948 ahead.

Every constant in that comparison, including the tuition and debt figures, is listed with its source on the methodology page. The ten-year window is short on purpose, and some degrees close the gap later. I’d rather tell you that up front than pretend otherwise.

What Could Cost You Money on the Way In

The upside is real. So are a few costs, and I want you to see them before you sign.

The training bill depends on the door you walk through. Union JATC apprenticeships often cost close to nothing, which is why our model’s $7,500 is the cautious number. A private trade school program costs real money up front, though trade-school grads usually get credit toward an apprenticeship.

Your own tools. Plan on buying your own hand tools, a good belt, and boots. The good ones aren’t cheap, and cheap ones cost you more when you replace them twice.

The license exam. Most states require an exam and a license to work as a journeyman, and many require continuing education after that. Some states hand licensing down to cities instead, so check with your local jurisdiction early.

Hours aren’t guaranteed. The BLS 2,080-hour year assumes you work full time all year. If work dries up and you sit at home for three weeks, your annual number drops with it.

Is There Actually Room for New Apprentices?

I’d rather hand you the actual projection than a recruiting line.

BLS projects electricians to grow 9 percent from 2024 to 2034, from 818,700 jobs to 896,100, against a 3.1 percent average for all occupations. That works out to about 81,000 openings a year, and most of them come from electricians retiring or leaving the trade, not brand-new demand.

Read that last part twice. Replacement openings show up every year whether construction is hot or slow, because people retire either way. That is steady demand, not a boom you have to time.

Where to Go From Here

If you’re deciding right now, do three things:

1. Look up your own state’s number on the electrician hub. In our data, state medians run from about $14,000 below the national number to about $38,000 above it.
2. Call the local JATC or apprenticeship program and ask for their wage scale in writing. You want the step percentages, the hours per step, and the journeyman rate.
3. Run both paths side by side in the ROI calculator with your state filled in.

If paid training is what drew you here, jobs that pay for your training covers the other trades that work the same way. If you’re weighing this against student loans, the debt math post runs that side in detail.

My dad taught me carpentry, and his dad taught him. Nobody in that line paid tuition to learn the trade, and nobody went four years without a paycheck to do it. The electrical trade still works the same way, and the numbers above show what that’s worth.