Union vs Non-Union Apprenticeship: The Real Pay and Cost Math

Most of what you’ll read about union vs non-union apprenticeship is somebody’s opinion.

Union guys swear by the hall. Open-shop guys swear by the freedom. I’ve spent more than 20 years in the trades, and I don’t have a dog in that fight.

So instead of opinions, I pulled the actual paperwork.

In Washington, where I run my remodeling business, every registered apprenticeship has to file its program standards with the state Department of Labor and Industries. Those documents spell out the wage ladder, who pays for books and who sets the pay. That makes it possible to put a union program and a non-union program side by side on the same trade.

I picked electrical, because both sides run big programs here. The union side is the Columbia Basin Electrical Training Alliance, which ties its pay to the contract between IBEW Local 112 and the Inland Empire Chapter of NECA. The non-union side is the Construction Electrician program run by the Construction Industry Training Council of Washington (CITC), an open-shop training school in Bellevue.

The Two Wage Ladders, Step by Step

Both programs are 8,000 hours of on-the-job training, which is about four years of full-time work. Both pay apprentices a percentage of a journey-level rate. Here is how each one climbs, straight from the state filings.

Union (IBEW 112 / NECA)	Pay	Non-union (CITC)	Pay
0 - 1,600 hrs	40%	0 - 1,000 hrs	40%
1,601 - 2,500 hrs	45%	1,001 - 2,000 hrs	45%
2,501 - 3,500 hrs	50%	2,001 - 3,000 hrs	50%
3,501 - 5,000 hrs	65%	3,001 - 4,000 hrs	55%
5,001 - 6,500 hrs	80%	4,001 - 5,000 hrs	65%
6,501 - 8,000 hrs	85%	5,001 - 6,000 hrs	75%
		6,001 - 7,000 hrs	80%
		7,001 - 8,000 hrs	85%

Look at the first and last rows. Both start at 40 percent and both finish at 85 percent.

The union ladder takes longer steps early and bigger jumps later. The open-shop ladder raises you every 1,000 hours in smaller bites.

I ran the hours-weighted average for each one, meaning what percentage you’d earn on average across all 8,000 hours. The union ladder works out to about 62.4 percent of journey rate.

The non-union ladder works out to about 61.9 percent. That’s a rounding error.

So the percentages are not where these two paths split. The split is in what that percentage gets multiplied by.

What the Percentage Is Multiplied By

This is the part nobody explains to an 18-year-old, and it matters more than the ladder.

On the union side, the filing says apprentices get their percentage of the journey-level hourly wage and fringe benefits set by the current collective bargaining agreement. The contract sets the number. When the contract goes up, every apprentice step goes up with it.

On the non-union side, CITC’s filing sets the journey rate differently. Once a year the program surveys its participating employers for what they pay their journeymen on non-prevailing-wage work, then averages those rates.

That average becomes the floor. Employers can pay an apprentice more than that, but not less. Outside of federal jobs, the CITC standard talks about wages, not a matching benefits package.

Here’s why that difference is real money. I covered apprentice electrician pay using the IBEW Local 110 contract in St. Paul, Minnesota.

For the 2025-26 contract year, a journeyman inside wireman there made $56.80 an hour in base pay, but the total package was $94.89 an hour once benefits were counted. That gap is health coverage and retirement money that never shows up on a pay stub as wages.

When you compare a union offer and a non-union offer, compare the whole package. A non-union shop that pays $3 more an hour on the check but leaves you buying your own health insurance may not be the better deal.

What Each Path Costs You to Get In

Neither path should cost anything close to what college costs. But “free” isn’t quite right either, so here’s what the paperwork actually says.

• Union (Washington JATCs): Washington’s Career Bridge site, run by the state workforce board, lists $0 tuition, $0 required fees and $0 books for union inside wireman programs like the Southwest Washington JATC (IBEW 76) and the Northwest Washington JATC (IBEW 191). The Columbia Basin filing does mention school fees apprentices have to pay before class starts, so ask each program what yours will be.
• Non-union (CITC): Career Bridge also lists CITC’s construction electrician apprenticeship at $0 tuition. But CITC’s state filing says apprentices are responsible for their own books, lab fees and late fees for classroom instruction. You also pay for the aptitude test yourself.
• Non-union (IEC New England): Not every open-shop program is low cost. The Independent Electrical Contractors of New England lists annual tuition of $2,100 for members and $3,100 for non-members for 2027-28, books not included, on a four-year program.

That last one is worth sitting with. Four years at those rates runs $8,400 to $12,400 before books. That’s still a fraction of a degree, and you’re earning a paycheck the whole time.

But it’s not zero, so ask who pays: you, your employer, or the two of you split.

Our ROI model budgets $7,500 in training costs for the electrician path. That’s on purpose. Plenty of union apprentices will spend far less, but I’d rather the calculator be cautious than promise you a free ride.

Who Actually Finishes

This is the number that surprised me most, and it’s the one I’d want to know at 18.

Career Bridge also publishes outcomes for each program. Here’s what it showed when I pulled it in October 2026:

Program	Type	Completion rate	Typical (median) earnings
Southwest Washington JATC, Inside Wireman	Union (IBEW 76)	38%	$57/hr, $103,800/yr
Northwest Washington JATC, Inside Wireman	Union (IBEW 191)	36%	$60/hr, $111,800/yr
CITC, Construction Electrician	Non-union	14%	$60/hr, $112,100/yr

Two honest takeaways from that table.

First, the typical earnings are close. The non-union program’s median is right there with the union programs. Anyone who tells you open-shop electricians can’t make good money in this state is not looking at the state’s own numbers.

For context, the BLS median for all electricians in Washington is $95,220 in the May 2025 data this site runs on, so all three programs land above the Washington electrician median.

Second, completion is not close. Roughly 1 in 3 union apprentices finished in these programs, compared with about 1 in 7 at CITC.

Career Bridge doesn’t spell out on the program page exactly how it measures completion, so I wouldn’t stake a life decision on the precise gap. But it’s a big enough difference that I’d ask any program you’re considering one question before you sign: how many of the people who start actually finish?

Three programs in one state don’t prove anything nationally. They’re a real comparison, which is more than most union vs non-union arguments ever bring to the table.

The National Picture From BLS

For a wider lens, the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes an annual union membership report. The 2025 numbers came out in February 2026.

• Across all full-time wage and salary workers, union members had median weekly earnings of $1,404. Non-union workers had $1,174. That’s about 20 percent more for union members.
• In the construction industry, 11.1 percent of workers were union members in 2025.
• In construction and extraction occupations, the rate was 16.4 percent.

Two cautions.

BLS itself says those earnings comparisons are “on a broad level and do not control for many factors that can be important in explaining earnings differences.” So the 20 percent is not a clean measure of what a union card is worth in your trade. The membership numbers also mean that most people working in construction today are not union members.

Non-union is not some fringe path. It’s where most of the industry works.

How I’d Choose Between Them

I came up as a carpenter in a family of carpenters, and before the Air Force I worked for other remodeling contractors. The best advice I can give a young tradesman, union or not, is the same advice I got: work for a good contractor first. Learn how a well-run outfit does it before you worry about anything else.

With that in mind, here’s how I’d weigh it:

• If you can get into a union JATC in your area, the structure is hard to beat. The ladder is written into a contract, the benefits ride along with the wage, and in the programs above, people finished at more than twice the rate. The catch is getting in. Expect application windows, aptitude tests and interviews.
• If the union isn’t strong in your area, or you can’t get in this cycle, a registered open-shop apprenticeship is a real career. In Washington it pays at the same percentages and its graduates earn in the same range. Just make sure it’s state-registered, find out what the journey rate is, and get the benefits in writing.
• Either way, ask about the hidden costs. Books, lab fees, test fees, tools, and dues on the union side. None of them are a dealbreaker. You just want to know before you start, the same way you’d want every line item in a contractor’s bid before you sign it.

And don’t sit out a year waiting on the perfect door. The industry needs people right now. Finding good workers is one of the hardest parts of running my business, and it’s the reason I’d rather see you start than wait.

Run Your Own Numbers

The wage ladder matters, but the state you work in matters more. Pick your trade and state in the ROI calculator to see how an apprenticeship stacks up against a four-year degree over ten years.

One note on our model so you read it right.

The calculator uses a smoothed apprentice ladder for electricians of 50, 65, 80 and 90 percent across four years. Both Washington ladders above start lower, at 40 percent. That means our calculator’s apprentice years run a bit generous on either path, and the real first year will likely pay less than it shows.

Everything else, from tuition to taxes, is laid out on the methodology page.

If you want the electrician path start to finish, read how to become an electrician without college, or go straight to the electrician hub for state-by-state pay.