Benchmarking Foreman & Field-Supervisor Pay in Trade Contracting

A $4-an-hour foreman offer that didn't land

A 60-person mechanical contractor in the Midwest lost its top foreman candidate three days after extending an offer last fall. The number wasn't insulting — it was the journeyman rate plus four dollars an hour, the same formula the owner had used for the last two foreman hires. It felt fair. It also wasn't competitive, because it wasn't actually a foreman number. It was a journeyman number with a flat bump stapled to it. The candidate took a counteroffer that wasn't dramatically higher in raw dollars, but it came from a shop that had priced the supervisor role as its own job — because, in the federal wage data that both companies could have pulled for free, it is one. This piece walks through the occupation codes that actually price foreman and field-supervisor labor, how to pull the right percentile table for your metro, and how to turn that table into a band instead of a guess.

Journeyman Plus a Few Dollars Doesn't Price a Different Job

Most trade shops without an HR function set foreman pay the same way: take the journeyman wage they already know, add a flat dollar amount or percentage for "being in charge," and call it a band. It's an understandable shortcut — it's fast, and it feels proportional. But the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't track foreman pay as a markup on journeyman pay. It tracks first-line supervisors of trade and mechanical workers as their own occupation, with their own wage survey responses, collected from employers who report what they actually pay the person running the crew — not the person swinging the tool. When a shop prices the foreman seat off the journeyman number, it's benchmarking against the wrong occupation entirely, and the gap between the two numbers is exactly the gap a competing offer can walk through.

The Two BLS Codes That Actually Apply to Foreman Wage Benchmarking

There are two relevant occupation codes in the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program, and which one applies depends on the crew:

• SOC 47-1011, First-Line Supervisors of Construction Trades and Extraction Workers — the code that covers foremen and field supervisors over electricians, plumbers, carpenters, ironworkers, sheet metal workers, masons, and construction equipment operators.
• SOC 49-1011, First-Line Supervisors of Mechanics, Installers, and Repairers — the code that covers supervisors over HVAC/mechanical technicians, industrial maintenance workers, and millwrights.

Both codes sit in the same OEWS program that produces the trade wage data most contractors already use — the same methodology, five wage percentiles (10th, 25th, 50th/median, 75th, and 90th), with annual figures calculated as the hourly mean times 2,080 hours. The difference is just which occupation the survey responses are tagged to. If a shop is pulling the journeyman electrician median (SOC 47-2111, reported at $62,350/year nationally as of the May 2024 OEWS release) and using it as the foreman anchor, it is one occupation code removed from the number it should be using.

OEWS wage data is reported at five percentiles — 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th — with annual wages derived from the hourly mean at 2,080 hours worked per year.

The current OEWS reference period is May 2025, released May 15, 2026 — the release was delayed by the federal government shutdown that ran October 1 through November 12, 2025, though BLS reported that response rates stayed within the normal range and no methodology changes were required. The prior current release, May 2024, is the vintage behind most of the trade wage figures still circulating in spreadsheets right now. Whichever vintage a shop cites, it should say so — a wage figure with no release date attached is already stale the day someone reads it.

Pulling the Right Percentile Table for Your Metro

Neither 47-1011 nor 49-1011 has a single national number worth memorizing, because the whole point of OEWS is that it breaks wages down to the state and metropolitan level — the same drill-down used for journeyman trades. The practical steps:

1. Identify which code applies to the crew (construction trades vs. mechanical/installation trades — a multi-trade shop may need both).
2. Pull the OEWS table for that code at the metro or state level, for the current release.
3. Note all five percentiles, not just the median — the spread between the 25th and 75th percentile tells you more about your local labor market than the median alone.
4. Compare that table against the journeyman code for the same trade, in the same metro, from the same release.

This is the same drill-down logic covered in how multi-trade shops compare wages across crews and in how to decide which percentile to pay — the foreman seat just needs its own occupation code run through the same process, not a shortcut off a number you already have on hand.

A Worked Example: Turning a Percentile Table Into a Band

Say a contractor pulls the OEWS table for 47-1011 in its metro and, for illustration, finds a median of $72,000/year with a 25th percentile of $64,000 and a 75th percentile of $81,000 (these are round, hypothetical figures for teaching the method — a real band should come from the current table for the reader's own metro, not from this example). The contractor decides to anchor its offer at the 60th percentile, roughly $75,000, and applies a 15% spread buffer above and below:

• Band minimum: $75,000 × 0.85 ≈ $63,750
• Band midpoint: $75,000
• Band maximum: $75,000 × 1.15 ≈ $86,250

That's the same min/midpoint/max construction used for journeyman and apprentice bands — a percentile anchor plus a spread buffer — just run against the supervisor occupation code instead of the trade code underneath it. The anchor percentile and the buffer width are business decisions driven by how competitive a shop needs to be in its labor market; the input data should come from the current OEWS table for 47-1011 or 49-1011 in the reader's own metro.

Why the Foreman-Journeyman Gap Isn't a Flat Percentage

It's tempting to look at a few examples and conclude the supervisor code runs some fixed percentage above the journeyman code — 15%, 20%, whatever a given metro happens to show. That number moves by trade, by metro, and by release, and no single multiplier holds up across all of them. The honest version of this guidance is: pull both codes for your specific metro and compare the actual percentiles side by side, rather than applying a rule of thumb borrowed from a different trade or a different city. A flat markup is exactly the shortcut that cost the Midwest mechanical contractor its candidate — it feels precise and isn't.

What's not in question is that the gap matters to retention. Replacing an employee costs somewhere between half and twice their annual salary, according to Gallup's 2019 analysis of voluntary turnover — Gallup itself calls that a conservative estimate. A foreman who leaves because the supervisor role was priced like a journeyman role with a bonus is an expensive problem to have solved with better data up front. The cost of a bad skilled-trades hire covers that math in more depth.

Multi-Trade Shops: One Crew, Possibly Two Codes

A multi-trade contractor running electrical, mechanical, and millwright crews out of the same office doesn't get to use one supervisor code for everyone. The foreman over the electrical crew is priced under 47-1011; the foreman over the HVAC or industrial-maintenance crew is priced under 49-1011. Treating them as interchangeable — paying every field supervisor the same flat number regardless of which trade sits under them — ignores that OEWS is already telling you these are separately surveyed labor markets. The same logic that applies to comparing journeyman wages across trades in one shop applies one level up the org chart.

The career ladder underneath the foreman seat also runs through its own wage tiers — apprentice, journeyman, and in some trades a master or lead designation — each with its own percentile data worth pulling separately rather than assumed as a percentage of the rung above it. How apprentice, journeyman, and master pay bands typically stack is a useful companion read before setting the foreman number at the top of that ladder.

Where This Gets Easier

Pulling two occupation codes, cross-referencing percentiles across a metro, and rebuilding the comparison every time a role opens is exactly the kind of work that's free in dollars and expensive in hours. The Foreman & Field-Supervisor Wage Benchmark Workbook is built around the 47-1011 and 49-1011 codes specifically, with the percentile structure already laid out so the only input needed is your metro and your anchor decision. Shops comparing pay across more than one metro — a regional contractor bidding work in two or three labor markets — may also want the Metro Wage Comparison Workbook to see the full spread side by side. Either way, the underlying data is the same free, federal OEWS release it always was — the workbook just saves the Friday afternoon it otherwise takes to assemble it by hand.