Hiring Trades Outside a Metro: Using BLS Nonmetropolitan Area Wage Data

The Offer That Didn't Fit Any Metro Table

Picture a mechanical contractor with a shop forty minutes from the nearest city. A journeyman pipefitter gives notice, and the owner opens a wage lookup to price the replacement. The metro table for the closest city lists a number, but the owner knows the job sits outside that city's commuting zone, where the housing market, the competing employers and the drive all look different. The state-level figure feels too blunt. A job board shows three postings, all from companies a hundred miles away. By Friday afternoon the owner has three tabs open, no number he trusts, and a candidate waiting on a call back.

This is a common spot for a contractor who hires outside a metropolitan statistical area. The good news is that the federal wage survey already anticipates it. BLS reports wages for nonmetropolitan areas alongside metros, and those figures are free to use. The catch is knowing what those areas are, what they can and can't tell you, and when a different anchor is the safer choice.

This guide explains how BLS nonmetropolitan area wages for skilled trades work, how to read them, and how to anchor a rural trade offer without guessing.

What BLS Means by a Nonmetropolitan Area

The BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program publishes wage data at the national, state, and metropolitan/nonmetropolitan levels. It is a free, public-domain federal dataset, and the current reference period is May 2025, released May 15, 2026 (the prior release was May 2024). BLS describes roughly 530 metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas in its OEWS scope, per the BLS OEWS News Release for May 2025.

A metropolitan area is built around an urban core and the surrounding counties tied to it by commuting. A nonmetropolitan area is the opposite case: counties that fall outside any metropolitan statistical area. If you want a refresher on how metro boundaries get drawn, our explainer on what an MSA is and how it shapes wage data covers it.

In OEWS, rural counties are generally grouped into nonmetropolitan areas within each state, and some states have more than one. That grouping is why a single state can show several rural wage rows. Some readers search for "balance of state" areas, the leftover territory in a state. Names and county lists differ by state and release, so open the area definitions for your state on bls.gov/oes before you assume which counties your shop falls into.

Where to Find Nonmetro Wage Data for Your Trade

You do not need a subscription. The path is short:

1. Go to the BLS OEWS pages at bls.gov/oes and choose the current release.
2. Look up your trade by its SOC code. Electricians are 47-2111, plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters are 47-2152, and carpenters are 47-2031.
3. Pull the area table for your state and find the nonmetropolitan rows rather than the metro rows.
4. Note the release year printed on the table. Every wage figure belongs to a specific vintage.

If the mechanics of the tables are new to you, how to read BLS OEWS data for the trades walks through the columns line by line.

One useful reminder: OEWS reports five wage percentiles (10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th), and the annual figure equals the hourly mean multiplied by 2,080 hours, per the BLS OEWS methodology documents. The same structure applies to nonmetropolitan rows as to metro rows. Nothing about a rural row is a different kind of number.

Nonmetropolitan Area Wages for Skilled Trades: What the Data Can and Can't Tell You

The honest answer is that rural figures are real survey data, but they are often thinner than the metro versions.

OEWS is built from an establishment survey. According to the OEWS Technical Note for May 2025, the program samples about 1.1 million establishments across six semiannual panels over three years, representing roughly 55% of national employment. That is a large sample nationally. Spread across a sparsely populated area, though, a trade like pipefitting may have few employers surveyed, and BLS does not publish a figure where releasing it could identify an employer or where the data is too thin to be reliable. As a result you may see blank cells in some rows. Reading suppressed cells correctly matters, so check the notes on the BLS table.

Three practical readings follow from this:

• A published rural percentile is usable. If the 25th, 50th and 75th are all present for your SOC code, you have a legitimate rural anchor from a federal source.
• A missing percentile is information, not an error. It tells you the sample was thin, and you should widen your view.
• A rural number is not a promise about your shop. It describes what surveyed employers in that area reported for that occupation and vintage, not what a given candidate will accept.

We do not publish a rural-versus-metro pay gap figure here, because the size of that gap changes by trade, state and release. Pull the pair for your own trade and compare them directly.

Choosing Your Anchor: Nonmetro Area, State, or Nearest Metro

Benchmarking nonmetropolitan area wages for skilled trades comes down to picking the geography that best matches the labor market you actually compete in. Three options are available, and each has a failure mode.

The nonmetropolitan area row is the closest match when your job site and your likely hires live in those counties and the percentiles are published. Its weakness is thin data. Use it when all the percentiles you need are present.

The state figure is a stronger fallback when the rural row is suppressed or noisy. It pools more employers, so it is steadier, but it blends urban and rural pay, so it can overstate what a small town needs to pay or understate what a remote job needs to offer.

The nearest metro matters when candidates will commute in from it, or when your competitors recruit there. If a metro employer can hire your journeyman away by paying more and offering a shorter drive, that metro row is part of your market whether or not your shop sits inside it.

A simple rule of thumb: start with the nonmetro row, check it against the state row, and look at the nearest metro row as a ceiling check. If the three tell a similar story, you can anchor with confidence. If they diverge, the divergence is the useful finding, and it usually points to something local such as an employer, a project pipeline, or a commute.

Turning a Rural Anchor into an Offer

Once you have a number, the next question is how far above or below the midpoint of the distribution to pay. That is a percentile decision, and which percentile you should pay lays out the tradeoffs.

Here is the arithmetic as a worked example, with round inputs chosen to show the method and not to describe any real area. Suppose a nonmetro row shows a 50th-percentile hourly wage of $30 for your trade.

• Annual midpoint: $30 × 2,080 hours = $62,400
• Apply a 10% spread buffer on each side: minimum $56,160, maximum $68,640
• The band runs from $56,160 to $68,640, with $62,400 as the midpoint

Swap in the real hourly figure from your area's nonmetropolitan table and the same three lines give you an offer-ready band. If you would rather skip the arithmetic, the Trade Offer Check Calculator shows where a proposed offer lands against the cited OEWS percentiles for a metro. The State-by-State Trade Wage Atlas renders one trade's cited OEWS wage distribution across all 50 states and DC, with suppression shown honestly, which is useful as the state-level cross-check described above.

Remember that the percentile is a starting point. Commute, schedule and the kind of work belong in the conversation with the candidate, not in a made-up adjustment to the wage table.

SkilledMarkets joins BLS OEWS wage percentiles with ONET occupational profiles by SOC code (ONET content is produced by the National Center for O*NET Development and licensed CC BY 4.0), and lets you move from national to state to metro data. The underlying wage data is free from BLS, and you can do all of this by hand. The product exists to save you the Friday afternoon.

Check These Before You Make the Offer

Before you send an offer built on rural data, run through a short list:

• Is the table from the current OEWS release, and have you written down the vintage?
• Are all the percentiles you need published for your SOC code, or is something suppressed?
• Does the state row agree broadly with the nonmetro row?
• Have you looked at the nearest metro to see whether a commuter could out-bid you?
• If your state has pay-posting or disclosure rules, have you confirmed them with your state labor department? Requirements vary by state, and we are not giving legal advice.

Write down which area, which release and which percentile you used, so the next hire starts from the same place. For more on building that habit without an HR department, see owner-operator wage benchmarking.

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