Budgeting a Multi-Location Trade Hiring Plan

When One Spreadsheet Covers Three Markets, Something's Wrong

An ops manager at a 90-person electrical and HVAC contractor built one headcount budget for the year — one wage line per trade, applied company-wide, because that's how the spreadsheet had always worked when the company operated out of a single shop. Then the company opened a second branch two states over, and a third in a smaller metro in between. The same journeyman electrician wage line that recruited fine in the home market got two declined offers in the new branch within a month. Meanwhile, the smaller metro was quietly overpaying — offers were accepted immediately, which should have been a clue, not a relief.

The problem wasn't the number. It was that there was only one number. A contractor hiring the same trade in three different metros is operating in three different wage markets, whether or not the budget acknowledges it. Building a multi-location trade hiring budget means starting from headcount-by-trade-by-metro, not headcount-by-trade-company-wide, and anchoring each line to the wage data for the market it's actually hiring in. Here's how to build that budget without guessing.

Why a Single Company-Wide Wage Number Breaks at Scale

Wage data isn't flat across geography, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't publish it that way. The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program reports wages at the national level, the state level, and the metropolitan/nonmetropolitan area level — roughly 530 such areas in total. That third level exists because labor markets are local: construction and trades wages in a high-demand metro genuinely differ from wages in a smaller or lower-cost one, and a budget built on a single blended number will systematically misprice at least one of your locations.

If you're not sure what an MSA is or why BLS slices data that way, the mechanics are worth understanding before you build a multi-metro plan — see how MSA-level wage data is defined and why it matters for a trade employer specifically.

How BLS OEWS Percentiles Work — and Why They're the Right Anchor

OEWS reports wages as a distribution, not a single average. For each occupation and each geography, BLS publishes five percentiles — the 10th, 25th, 50th (median), 75th, and 90th — plus a mean. Annual figures are calculated as the hourly mean times 2,080 hours (a standard work-year), per BLS's own published methodology.

"OEWS wage estimates are available for over 800 occupations... at the national, state, and metropolitan area levels," with wages reported across five percentiles so users can see the full distribution, not just an average.

That percentile structure is what makes a defensible budget possible. Instead of asking "what should we pay an electrician," you're asking "where in the distribution do we want to sit for this trade, in this metro, for this level of experience" — and then building a band around that anchor point. A 50th-percentile anchor for a journeyman electrician means half the surveyed workforce in that geography earns more and half earns less; a 75th-percentile anchor is a deliberate decision to recruit above the market midpoint. Either is defensible. Guessing isn't.

What a Trade-by-Trade, Metro-by-Metro Headcount Plan Looks Like

Before the dollars, get the headcount structure right. Each line in the plan should specify: trade (by SOC code, not job title, since titles vary by shop), metro, and headcount needed. A contractor hiring electricians, HVAC techs, and plumbers across three metros doesn't have one budget — it has up to nine line items, each needing its own wage anchor.

The national medians give you a starting reference point for scale, even before you drill into metro-specific figures. Electricians carried a median annual wage of $62,350 nationally as of May 2024, per the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook. Plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters came in at $62,970 for the same period. Carpenters sat at $59,310, with 959,000 workers in the occupation nationally. These are national anchors, not metro-specific ones — useful for sanity-checking a budget's overall scale, not for setting any single metro's offer band.

For a wider comparison across several trades at once, a multi-trade wage comparison is a faster way to see how these medians stack up against each other before you start splitting them by metro.

A Worked Example: Turning National Medians Into Metro Budget Lines

Here's the method, worked through with illustrative numbers. Say the contractor from the opening scenario needs four electricians across three metros: two in its established home metro, one in the new branch metro, and one in the smaller satellite metro.

The national electrician median is $62,350 (BLS OOH, May 2024). In a real budget, each of the three metros would get its own OEWS metro-area percentile figures, pulled directly from the current BLS OEWS release — not estimated from the national number. For the purposes of illustrating the method here, assume (hypothetically, not as real OEWS data) that the home metro runs about 12% above the national median, the new branch metro sits close to the national figure, and the satellite metro runs about 9% below it. Applying those illustrative adjustment factors to the national anchor produces three different metro-level anchor points — which is the entire reason a single company-wide number fails: real metro wage levels vary by roughly this kind of spread, sometimes more.

From there, each metro anchor needs a spread buffer to become a usable min/midpoint/max band. A ±15% buffer around a metro anchor of, say, $62,350 would produce a band running from roughly $53,000 to $71,700, with the anchor itself as the midpoint. Multiply that band by the headcount at that metro, and you have a defensible payroll range for that line item — not a single guessed number, but a bounded range your ops team can negotiate inside.

The number that matters here isn't the 12%/9% example — it's the method: pull a real, dated OEWS percentile for each metro and trade you're hiring, apply a spread buffer appropriate to the role, and multiply by headcount. A workbook built around exactly this structure is available as the metro wage comparison workbook, for shops that want the calculation pre-built rather than assembled from scratch.

Setting the Spread Buffer and Rolling It Into One Annual Number

The spread buffer is a judgment call, not a BLS figure — it reflects how much room your ops team wants between a floor offer and a ceiling offer for a given role and metro. Entry-level roles in a tight labor market often run a narrower buffer, because there's less room to negotiate before the offer stops being competitive. Senior or highly specialized roles — a lead industrial-maintenance tech, for instance — often run wider, because experience and certification variance inside the role is itself wider. If you're hiring industrial-maintenance or millwright roles across multiple plants, the benchmarking considerations are different enough from construction-trade hiring that it's worth treating as its own planning exercise.

Once every trade-by-metro line has an anchor and a buffer, the roll-up is simple arithmetic: multiply each line's midpoint by its headcount, sum across metros and trades, and you have an annual base-wage budget built on cited wage data rather than a blended guess. The output isn't a single number either — it's a range, because you've carried the min and max through the roll-up too, which gives finance a realistic floor-to-ceiling picture instead of a false-precision point estimate.

For contractors who want the full set of per-trade, per-metro wage distributions assembled once rather than pulled metro-by-metro from BLS's own site, the multi-trade metro wage report compiles cited OEWS figures across the trades most multi-location shops are hiring for.

Where This Leaves the Budget — and the Planner Built for It

The headcount-by-trade-by-metro structure described here is exactly what SkilledMarkets' Multi-Location Hiring Budget Planner is built to automate: it joins BLS OEWS percentile data with O*NET occupational profiles by SOC code, lets you set a percentile anchor and spread buffer per trade and per metro, and rolls the resulting bands into one annual budget — without a dozen separate BLS data-map sessions.

That's the whole mechanism: percentile anchor plus spread buffer, applied per metro, rolled up once. Nothing about the underlying wage data is proprietary — BLS OEWS and O*NET are both public, free, and citable on their own. What the planner saves is the hours spent pulling and reconciling that data by hand across every metro and trade a multi-location shop actually hires for. If that's the Friday afternoon currently buried in your own spreadsheet, the planner is built to take it off your plate.