Electrician Salary Guide for Employers (SOC 47-2111)

The Candidate Just Countered — Do You Know If Your Number Is Right?

Your recruiter calls on a Tuesday afternoon: the journeyman you want to hire loved the interview, the foreman liked him, but he's not taking your offer. He countered at $5 more per hour, says he's got two other bids, and needs an answer by Friday. You have about 72 hours to decide whether to hold, move, or lose him — and the only wage data you have is what you paid the last guy three years ago.

That moment is exactly what this guide is built for.

SOC 47-2111 — the BLS occupational code for electricians — covers every classification you're hiring: apprentice, journeyman, journeyman-to-lead, and master. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes annual wage percentiles for the trade at the national, state, and metro level, and the O*NET system publishes the full occupational profile: the skills, tasks, knowledge areas, and training requirements that define the role. Together, they give you the data you need to price an offer you can defend.

This electrician salary guide walks you through the BLS numbers, the O*NET profile, and the mechanics of turning a percentile into an offer-ready salary band — so the next time a candidate counters, you know exactly where your number sits in the market and whether to move.

What the BLS Data Says: Electrician Wages by Percentile (SOC 47-2111)

The BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program — the same survey behind every wage number you see in the Occupational Outlook Handbook — samples roughly 1.1 million establishments across the country and produces annual wage estimates by occupation, geography, and percentile. The May 2024 release is the current authoritative source for electricians.

Here's what that data shows for SOC 47-2111 nationally (BLS, May 2024):

Percentile	Annual Wage
10th	$39,430
50th (median)	$62,350
90th	$106,030

What these numbers mean for your offer:

A percentile tells you what share of workers in that role earn less than a given wage. The 50th percentile (median) means half of all employed electricians earn less than $62,350 and half earn more — it's the market midpoint. The 10th percentile ($39,430) is roughly where an entry-level apprentice or first-year helper lands. The 90th percentile ($106,030) is where highly experienced master electricians, specialty industrial electricians, and those in high-cost metros tend to cluster.

If your standard journeyman offer sits at or below the national median, you're pricing for the bottom half of the labor market. In a trade with +9% projected job growth through 2034 — roughly three times the economy-wide average — the median is often the floor, not the target.

The BLS publishes state-level and metro-level OEWS breakdowns for SOC 47-2111 as well. Those local figures can vary substantially from the national median depending on cost of living, union density, and local demand — particularly in markets like Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, and Phoenix, where construction activity has been running hot. Because local medians change with each annual release, we don't publish them here; instead, we direct you to bls.gov/oes to pull the current figure for your specific state or metro. For a guided walkthrough of how to read those tables, see our skilled trades wage benchmarking guide.

The O*NET Profile: What You're Actually Paying For

Wages don't exist in a vacuum. The reason a journeyman electrician commands a higher percentile than, say, a general laborer is the skill set, training investment, and licensing burden the role requires. Understanding that profile helps you write a sharper job description, match your pay to the right classification, and have a more honest conversation with a candidate who pushes back on your number.

O*NET OnLine (onetonline.org) maintains the federal government's authoritative occupational profile system, covering more than 1,000 occupation titles. Here's what the O*NET profile for SOC 47-2111 shows:

Job Zone: 3 — Medium Preparation Needed. O*NET groups occupations into five Job Zones based on how much education, experience, and training they typically require, with Zone 1 being the least preparation and Zone 5 the most. Job Zone 3 means electricians typically need one to four years of vocational training, an apprenticeship, or related on-the-job experience. O*NET's own example: completing a 3–4 year apprenticeship program and passing a licensing exam is the standard entry path. That's a meaningful training investment by any measure — and it's a primary reason the median wage for SOC 47-2111 sits above the all-occupations median.

Core knowledge areas: Electrical systems, building and construction practices, mathematics, mechanical principles, and customer service (residential and commercial service work). Candidates who can articulate their knowledge in these areas — not just their years of experience — are usually worth paying more to keep.

Key skills: Troubleshooting, installation, operation monitoring, reading comprehension (code books, blueprints, specs), and critical thinking. These are the skills that separate a journeyman who can rough in a circuit from one who can commission a complex panel under time pressure.

Typical work context: Electricians work on-site, often in confined spaces, at heights, and in variable weather conditions. Physical demands are real; so is the licensing and continuing-education burden in most states. When candidates negotiate on compensation, they're often factoring in the total cost of maintaining their license, tools, and certifications — and so should you.

For the full O*NET task list, abilities profile, and work-context ratings for SOC 47-2111, visit our O*NET occupational profiles for trades overview. You can also explore the raw profile at onetonline.org.

This article includes information from O*NET OnLine, developed by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration. O*NET is a registered trademark of the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration.

Why the Electrician Market Is Especially Tight Right Now

The national median tells you what the market pays today. The growth outlook tells you where the pressure is heading. For electricians, both signals point in the same direction.

BLS projects +9% employment growth for SOC 47-2111 from 2024 to 2034 — a rate the BLS itself classifies as "much faster than average." That translates to approximately 81,000 annual job openings over the decade, a number that includes both net new positions and replacement openings as experienced electricians retire. The trade currently employs 818,700 workers nationally (BLS, 2024).

To put the growth rate in context: total US employment is projected to grow about 3.1% over the same period. Electrician demand is growing at nearly three times that pace.

Overlay two additional pressures:

1. Retirements. Roughly one in five construction workers is over age 55, according to data compiled by the Associated Builders and Contractors. The pipeline of apprentices and journeymen moving up the classifications isn't replacing those exits fast enough.

2. Wage growth across the economy. The Employment Cost Index shows private-industry wages and salaries rose 3.4% year-over-year as of March 2026. Candidates know their market value is rising — and they're negotiating accordingly.

For a trade employer with 10–200 employees, this market means one thing: the candidate in your inbox with a counter-offer has options. Pricing your offer below the market percentile that fits their classification isn't a negotiating position; it's a vacancy.

See our full breakdown of skilled trades labor market data and demand drivers for more context on the forces shaping electrician hiring in 2025–2026.

Building an Electrician Salary Band: A Worked Example

A salary band (also called a pay band or compensation range) converts a market percentile into a usable hiring tool: a minimum, midpoint, and maximum that define what your firm pays for a given classification. You set the midpoint at the market percentile that matches your competitive position, then apply a spread buffer — a percentage above and below the midpoint — to create room for experience, licensing level, and merit.

Here's how to build one using the BLS electrician data. This is a worked example to illustrate the method; your actual band should be anchored on the percentile that matches your market and classification.

Scenario: You're hiring journeyman electricians in a competitive suburban market. You want to price at the 75th percentile — meaning you're willing to pay more than three out of four electricians in the market — to attract experienced candidates and reduce time-to-fill.

Step 1 — Set the midpoint. The BLS May 2024 national median for SOC 47-2111 is $62,350. The national 90th percentile is $106,030. A 75th-percentile anchor sits between those two points; for this example, use $78,000 as a round midpoint (confirm the actual 75th-percentile figure for your geography at bls.gov/oes before building a live band).

Step 2 — Apply a spread buffer. A common spread for a skilled trade role is ±15% around the midpoint. That gives you:

Band Point	Calculation	Annual Rate
Minimum	$78,000 × 0.85	$66,300
Midpoint	—	$78,000
Maximum	$78,000 × 1.15	$89,700

Step 3 — Interpret the band. New journeymen coming off apprenticeship with no additional licensing might start near the minimum. Experienced journeymen with a commercial specialty or supervisory experience might land at or above the midpoint. A lead journeyman managing a two-person crew and carrying an additional endorsement might justify approaching the maximum. The band gives you principled flexibility — without it, every offer is a gut-feel negotiation.

For a deeper walkthrough of the band-building methodology across classifications and trades, see how to build a salary band for trades.

What Gets the Cost-of-Getting-It-Wrong

Under-pricing an offer isn't free. Neither is making an offer on gut feel that turns into a bad hire six months in.

The cost of mis-pricing a journeyman electrician offer shows up in a few places:

• A vacancy that extends for weeks. SHRM data puts the median time-to-fill at around 44 days. For a trade role where a missing body means a crew runs one person short on a job-site, that's not just a recruiting problem — it's a revenue problem.
• A re-recruit cycle. SHRM benchmarks suggest replacing an employee can cost 50%–200% of annual salary. On a $62,350 journeyman, that's a modeled range of roughly $31,000–$125,000 in total replacement cost — covering recruiting fees, onboarding, and the productivity gap while the new hire gets up to speed. These are SHRM/DOL illustrative benchmarks, not measured outcomes; your actual cost depends on your market and firm size, but the direction is the same.
• A counter-offer you could have made proactively. If the candidate's counter is within your band, you already have permission to move. If it's above your band, you know to hold — and you can explain why. Without a band, every counter is a judgment call made under pressure.

The goal of an electrician salary guide like this one isn't to tell you the exact number to offer — that depends on your state, your metro, your classification structure, and what the May 2025 OEWS release shows for your geography. The goal is to give you the framework to get to a defensible number in about ten minutes, not three spreadsheet-hours.

Where to Go From Here

The BLS OEWS data at bls.gov/oes is free and authoritative. The O*NET profile at onetonline.org is free and comprehensive. What they don't give you is a trade-employer workflow: SOC-code lookup by trade name, a geographic drill-down UI, or a salary-band generator that converts a percentile into a min/mid/max in one step.

That's what SkilledMarkets is built for — BLS OEWS + O*NET data, joined and formatted for the trade employer making an offer today. Our plans start at $199/month, with a 14-day free trial and no credit card required to get started.

If you're pricing offers across multiple trades, the Skilled Trades Compensation Guide 2026 (PDF) is a one-time purchase that covers national percentile tables for the major trade SOC codes — electricians, plumbers, HVAC, welders, and more — in a format you can share with your ops team or attach to a board presentation without needing a platform login.

Either way, the next time a journeyman counters your offer on a Tuesday afternoon, you'll have a number you can stand behind.