Trades Handbook
Twenty-two occupations pay well above that line. Five of them cost nothing to enter, because the industry pays you while it trains you. Every figure on this page is the federal government's own.
Median annual wage. Half the people doing the job earn more than this, half earn less. Colour shows how you get in. The dashed line is what half of America earns.
The same job, top to bottom. The pale bar runs from the lowest tenth to the highest tenth. The solid bar is the middle half. The line is the median.
Tuition to reach the starting line. Two of these pay you instead.
An elevator apprentice earns 40 to 50 percent of journeyman scale from the first morning and climbs every year. A trainee at the FAA Academy is on the federal payroll at $22.61 an hour while learning. Neither one borrows a dollar.
Months between the day you start and the day the work starts paying you.
Projected change in the number of jobs, 2025 to 2035.
Openings a year in construction and extraction, counting retirements and people leaving.
Additional construction workers the industry says it needs to hire in 2026 alone.
Manufacturing jobs to fill by 2033. Around half are expected to go unfilled.
Years of saving to reach $1,000,000, at three savings rates. Assumes 72 percent of the wage lands in your hand and 7 percent a year after inflation.
Half of everyone in the job earns less than the figure shown. New entrants start near the bottom of the range, not the middle.
Power-line workers died on the job at a rate of 19 to 24 per 100,000 across 2011 to 2015. The rate for all American workers was 3.3 to 3.5.
Apprenticeships recruit in windows, often once every two years, and close when the list is full. Nobody writes to tell you one opened.
The Labor Department puts it plainly: 94 percent of people who complete a registered apprenticeship are still employed afterwards, on an average salary of $84,000.
Nobody advertises these jobs, because nobody needs your tuition to run them. That is the only reason you hadn't seen this page before.