Comparing Wages Across Multiple Trades (For Multi-Trade Contractors)

The moment the comparison breaks down

You run three crews — pipefitters, welders, and equipment operators — and you're about to make a job offer to a heavy-equipment operator who's coming over from a competitor. Your HR manager pulls up last year's offer letter for a similar role, adjusts for a modest raise, and sends the number.

Three days later the candidate declines. No counteroffer, no conversation. Just gone.

What your team didn't catch: operator wages in your region have moved, and your welders — who talk — are already whispering that the gap between their rate and the new operator posting feels thin. Now you're looking at potential turnover across two trades from a single mis-priced offer.

This is the specific pain of running a multi-trade shop. Each of your active SOC codes (the government's Standard Occupational Classification labels that map to every licensed trade) moves on its own schedule, driven by its own supply of apprentices, its own licensing pipeline, and its own regional demand. A compensation review you did eighteen months ago for one trade tells you almost nothing about where three other trades sit today.

This article gives you a practical framework for a side-by-side multi-trade wage comparison — what data to pull, how to read it, and how to spot the trades where you've quietly drifted below market before the resignation letter lands on your desk.

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Why each trade moves independently — and why that creates drift

Most specialty-trade employers set wages reactively: match what the last hire made, bump a few percent at review time, and call it market. That works fine when you're hiring in a single trade. It breaks the moment you're managing comp across four or five different occupations, because the BLS data shows that trade medians cluster surprisingly close together at the national level while diverging sharply at higher percentiles — and each trade's growth trajectory is different.

Here's the national picture for the trades that most commonly appear together on a multi-trade contractor's payroll (all figures: BLS OEWS, May 2024, national):

Trade	SOC Code	Median (annual)	10th pct	90th pct
Plumbers, pipefitters & steamfitters	47-2152	$62,970	—	—
Electricians	47-2111	$62,350	$39,430	$106,030
Structural iron & steel workers	47-2221	$62,700	$42,000	$107,520
HVAC mechanics & installers	49-9021	$59,810	$39,130	$91,020
Welders, cutters, solderers & brazers	51-4121	$51,000	$38,130	$75,850
Construction equipment operators	47-2073	$58,320	$39,850	$99,930

Source: bls.gov/oes. For the current release, always pull directly from bls.gov/oes — figures above reflect May 2024.

Look at that spread. The medians range from $51,000 (welders) to $62,970 (pipefitters) — a $12,000 gap at the midpoint alone. At the 90th percentile the picture is even more dramatic: a top-decile ironworker earns $107,520 while a top-decile welder earns $75,850. If you're anchoring your welder comp decisions to your electrician comp decisions without checking the underlying SOC, you're almost certainly over- or under-paying someone.

The growth trajectory matters just as much as the current median. Electricians are projected to grow at +9% through 2034 — described by BLS as "much faster than average" — while welding sits at +2% and pipefitting at +4% (BLS OOH, 2024–34). A faster-growing trade has a tighter candidate supply, which means wage pressure lands sooner. A year-over-year view of trade wage changes is the clearest way to spot which of your active trades is accelerating.

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The multi-trade wage comparison: what to actually pull

A useful multi-trade wage comparison is not a list of medians. It's a grid: each trade you hire for as a row, each relevant data point as a column. Here's the minimum set of columns that makes the comparison actionable:

SOC code. This is the anchor. Without it, you can't be sure you're pulling the right BLS row — job titles vary by company; SOC codes don't. A "maintenance tech" at your shop might map to HVAC (49-9021) or to Industrial Machinery Mechanics (49-9041) — and those are different wage rows. Your skilled trades wage benchmarking guide walks through how to match your internal titles to the correct SOC.

National median. Your baseline orientation — the midpoint of the national wage distribution for that occupation. Half of all workers in the role earn more; half earn less.

10th and 90th percentile. These anchor the full range. The 10th percentile is roughly where you'd start a new apprentice with minimal field experience. The 90th percentile shows the ceiling a journeyman with specialized skills or a high-cost metro premium can command. The spread between them tells you how "stretchy" the market is for that trade.

25th and 75th percentile (when available). This is the interquartile range — the middle half of the market. The 75th percentile (3 out of 4 workers in the role earn less than this) is the competitive-hire target: the number you need to reach if you're trying to win against another offer.

Your current pay rate. Not what's in the job posting — what you're actually paying the people on your payroll right now.

Gap (your rate vs. market percentile). The column that tells you whether you're at the 25th, 50th, or 75th percentile relative to the BLS distribution. This is where drift becomes visible.

When you lay your active trades out this way, patterns emerge fast. You might find that your pipefitters are sitting comfortably at the 60th percentile while your equipment operators have drifted to the 30th — which explains why your operators are the ones leaving, and your pipefitters are staying.

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Reading the comparison: three red flags to watch

Red flag 1: A trade where your rate is below the BLS median. Below-median pay is a below-average retention bet. The further below, the faster you'll see turnover. Research consistently shows that pay is a top driver of voluntary departures in the trades — your why tradespeople quit over pay primer covers the mechanisms. Below-median isn't automatically wrong (you might be in a lower-cost geography, or hiring entry-level) but it needs to be a deliberate choice, not an accident.

Red flag 2: A wide gap between your highest-paid and lowest-paid trade that doesn't match the BLS spread. If your internal pay gap between welders and electricians is larger than the BLS percentile gap suggests it should be, someone is being underpaid relative to market — or someone else is getting paid for a premium that no longer exists in your market. Both are problems. The first drives turnover; the second erodes margin.

Red flag 3: A fast-growing trade where you haven't revisited comp in 12+ months. Electricians are growing at +9% per year in projected employment, which means new employers are entering your labor market and bidding up journeyman rates faster than a static annual review cycle can track. Welding at +2% is slower-moving; a 12-month review cycle is probably adequate. Electricians and HVAC (at +8%) need at least semi-annual check-ins. For broader context on how industrial maintenance wages are benchmarking, the same logic applies to adjacent maintenance trades.

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Building a salary band for each trade in the comparison

A median alone is a data point. A salary band is a hiring tool. The band converts a BLS percentile anchor into a min/midpoint/max range you can hand to a hiring manager as an offer guardrail.

Here's a worked example using the BLS May 2024 national median for welders ($51,000) as the band midpoint anchor. (This is a methodology illustration using round numbers — confirm actual figures from bls.gov/oes before using in an offer.)

• Midpoint: $51,000 (BLS median, May 2024, national)
• Spread buffer: ±20% (a common starting point for skilled trade roles; adjust for your geography and experience range)
• Band min: $51,000 × 0.80 = $40,800 — entry or apprentice-level with limited field experience
• Band max: $51,000 × 1.20 = $61,200 — senior journeyman or specialized certification premium

Now run the same calculation for each of your active trades using their respective BLS medians. The resulting grid — five trade rows, each with a min/mid/max — is your multi-trade compensation framework. It tells you where any offer should land relative to the market, and it makes internal equity visible: if a trade's band max overlaps with another trade's band min, you have a pay-compression story to think through.

Note: if you hire in a specific metro, the national median is a starting orientation, not the final number. Metro wage data for most trades is available directly from BLS at bls.gov/oes. Pull the metro-level OEWS figure for your MSA (metropolitan statistical area) and use that as your band midpoint instead. Some metro cells are suppressed by BLS when the sample is too small — if that happens for your area, fall back to the state figure, then national.

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The practical challenge: doing this across five trades at once

Here's the honest friction: pulling this comparison manually means opening five separate BLS OEWS tabs, cross-referencing SOC codes, downloading tab-delimited flat files, and building the grid in a spreadsheet — then doing it again in six months when you want to check for drift. For a single-trade shop that's a manageable one-time project. For a multi-trade contractor reviewing five or more SOC codes across a mix of geographies, it becomes a quarterly time sink.

That's the specific workflow SkilledMarkets is built to eliminate. The platform pulls BLS OEWS data by SOC code and geography into a side-by-side comparison view, layers the O*NET occupational profile alongside the wage data, and generates the min/midpoint/max salary band — without the spreadsheet. You can see where each of your active trades sits relative to the national and state distribution in the same view.

A review of SkilledMarkets' features covers what the comparison dashboard actually does; pricing starts at $199/month for shops tracking up to five occupations. If you want to walk through the comparison with your own trade mix, start a 14-day free trial — no free tier, but the trial is full access with no commitment.

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Your next step: build the grid before the next offer

The comparison exercise above — SOC code, national median, 10th/90th percentile, your current rate, the gap — takes about an hour to build manually from bls.gov/oes for a five-trade shop. Do it before your next hire in any of those trades, not after. The cost of a declined offer or an early departure from a mis-priced hire is typically measured in months of lost productivity and a recruiting bill that runs 15%–25% of first-year salary (SHRM/ANSI benchmark) — figures that dwarf the time it takes to check the data.

For a deeper look at any individual trade in your mix, the SkilledMarkets welder salary guide is a good starting point for the welding SOC; equivalent guides exist across the other trades. The skilled trades benchmarking guide covers the methodology end-to-end.

The candidate who declined your equipment operator offer last week probably already had a number in mind. The question is whether your next offer is built on the same data they used to form it.

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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.