Electrician pay by state in 2026: the spread and the industries

BLS puts the median pay for an electrician at $63,190 a year, or $30.38 an hour, in its May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics estimates (OEWS, 47-2111). The state medians underneath that run from $49,070 in Arkansas to $101,310 in Oregon - a gap of $52,240 for the same trade, doing work written against the same National Electrical Code under different state amendments.

Below is the median in all fifty states and the District of Columbia, the four industries that pay differently for the same trade, and the reason the state line is only the second most useful number on this page.

What electricians earn in every state

Median means the middle: half the electricians in that state earned more, half earned less. The third column is the distance from the national median of $63,190. All figures are annual, from the OEWS estimates for May 2025.

How to read this. Each figure is the state median for occupation code 47-2111 in the May 2025 OEWS release, taken from the state file BLS publishes on its OEWS tables page. BLS retired the per-occupation profile pages that used to carry these tables in HTML, so the downloadable state file and the public data API series are now the two readable forms of the same estimate. A median is not a starting wage and it is not an offer. It is the middle of everyone currently doing the job in that state, the newly licensed journeyman and the thirty-year service veteran together, and no single posting has to resemble it.

Which states pay electricians the most, and which the least?

Oregon, at $101,310. Then Illinois, Hawaii and Washington - the only other states where the median electrician clears $90,000. At the other end sit Arkansas at $49,070, Alabama at $55,690 and North Carolina at $56,800.

The OEWS estimates do not say why. This is a wage survey, not an explanation: nothing in the release attributes Oregon's number to licensing rules, union density, cost of living, or the mix of industrial versus residential work being done there. An article that tells you the cause is filling a gap the data leaves open, and the reason deserves to be treated as unsourced even when the ranking is not.

The ladder inside one state is longer than the map

What electricians earned nationally, May 2025

$42,64010th percentile, annual

$63,190Median, annual

$108,51090th percentile, annual

Fill in the quartiles and the shape gets clearer. The national 25th percentile is $49,430 and the 75th is $83,940, both from the same May 2025 release, which puts $65,870 between the bottom tenth of the trade and the top tenth. That is $13,630 more than the $52,240 separating Arkansas from Oregon.

One more number describes that shape. The national mean for electricians is $71,490 in the same May 2025 release, which sits $8,300 above the median - and a mean above a median means a long tail on the high side, a minority of electricians pulling the average up rather than a symmetrical band around the middle. Most people in the trade earn less than the average, and that is arithmetic, not pessimism.

So here is the position, and it is arguable: for most electricians the ladder is a bigger lever than the map. Illinois is the clean case. Its 10th percentile is $49,240 and its 90th is $123,660 - a $74,420 spread inside one state, one licensing regime and one code, wider than the $52,240 between the highest and lowest state medians in the country. A Journeyman Electrician sitting at the Illinois median of $99,560 has $24,100 of room above them without crossing a state line, changing a license, or moving a family.

The map is not nothing, and the same release says where it works. Oregon's 10th percentile is $59,550, which is $10,480 above the Arkansas median of $49,070 - so an Arkansas electrician who moves and lands at the very bottom of Oregon's range is still ahead on the wage line alone. What that move costs is priced nowhere in OEWS: a licensing exam on a different set of local amendments, a different cost of living, and the seniority already banked with a current employer. Ranking states is easy to publish and hard to act on. Climbing the distribution where you already hold a license is slower, less dramatic, and open to every reader of this page rather than only the ones willing to move.

Which industry pays an electrician the most?

Median annual wage for electricians by industry, May 2025

The four industries BLS lists in its top-industries table for occupation 47-2111.

Government, excluding education and hospitals		$79,820
Manufacturing		$74,550
Electrical contractors and other wiring installation		$61,570
Employment services		$57,760

Government work carries a median of $79,820 and staffing-agency work carries $57,760 - a difference of $22,060 for the same trade and, often enough, the same physical task on the same kind of building. Then look at the third bar. Electrical contractors and other wiring installation contractors, the industry most people picture when they picture an electrician, sit at $61,570, below the national median for the occupation itself.

That changes how a job title should be read. A Journeyman Electrician placed on a plant maintenance crew through an employment services firm and a Journeyman Electrician hired directly onto a municipal facilities team look like the same posting to a job board, and they are about $22,000 apart in the middle of their respective distributions. The industry range is real. Notice, though, that it is smaller than the state range - $22,060 against $52,240 - so an electrician optimizing only for sector is working the narrower of the two dials.

What else pays this way without a degree?

The Occupational Outlook Handbook lists similar occupations beside every profile, with the entry-level education and the 2025 median pay for each. For electricians, that list contains three occupations carrying the same high-school-diploma entry requirement and a median $32,130 to $46,720 above the electrician median.

BLS similar-occupations table, Electricians profile, May 2025 medians. An apprentice choosing between trades right now is looking at a $46,720 difference in the national median between electrician and elevator installer, on the same stated entry education. What the table does not show is how many positions sit behind each of those medians, or how hard the door is to open. A high median is not an offer, and it is not a queue length: BLS projects about 72,700 electrician openings a year on average through 2035, and the similar-occupations table publishes no comparable figure beside the pay column. Read that column as a ceiling worth knowing about, not as a plan.

A state median hides the metro inside it

Illinois has the second-highest state median in the country, and 23,120 electricians in the May 2025 estimates. The Chicago metro area, which crosses into Indiana, holds 17,720 electrician jobs on its own - so the Illinois state figure is largely Chicago's figure wearing a state's name.

OEWS metropolitan estimates for 47-2111, May 2025. The four Illinois rows are the point: $102,350 in Chicago against $80,460 in Peoria is a $21,890 spread between two Illinois metros under the same state licensing regime and the same code - and the Chicago figure covers the Indiana side of that metro too. Los Angeles at $73,810 sits below California's own median of $76,160 - the sort of thing a state ranking cannot show you and a hiring manager in Long Beach already knows.

What a four- or five-year apprenticeship buys

From apprentice to journey worker

1. 1
   High school diploma or equivalent

   The typical entry-level education BLS lists for the occupation. Some candidates first attend a technical school covering circuitry, safety and basic electrical concepts.

2. 2
   A 4- or 5-year apprenticeship

   For each year of the program, apprentices typically receive 2,000 hours of paid on-the-job training plus technical instruction in electrical theory, blueprint reading, mathematics, electrical code requirements, and safety and first-aid practices.

3. 3
   The licensing exam

   Most states require electricians to pass a test and be licensed. The tests cover the National Electrical Code and state and local electrical codes.

4. 4
   Journey worker

   After completing an apprenticeship, electricians are considered journey workers and may perform duties on their own, subject to local or state licensing requirements.

The paid part is what separates this route from most others into a $63,190 median. Eight to ten thousand hours of on-the-job training, all of it on payroll, and the title waiting at the end - journey worker, which is what a posting means when it advertises for a Journeyman Electrician - is the credential that changes what you are permitted to do unsupervised.

There is a wrinkle in the education data worth knowing before you fill in an application. BLS lists a high school diploma or equivalent as the typical entry-level education for the occupation. O*NET, which surveys people doing the work, reports that 62 percent of respondents said a post-secondary certificate is required and 31 percent said a high school diploma, and it places electricians in Job Zone Three, medium preparation needed. Both are true at once: the legal floor is a diploma, and the practical floor in most hiring markets is a finished apprenticeship or certificate. So put the apprenticeship completion and the license number on the application, not only the diploma.

The license is also the quiet cost hiding behind the state ranking. Most states require electricians to pass a test and be licensed, and those tests cover the National Electrical Code plus state and local electrical codes - so an Arkansas journeyman eyeing Oregon's $101,310 is not only moving house, but re-sitting an exam on a different set of local amendments. BLS does not publish which states accept another state's license, how long a reciprocity application takes, or what a licensed electrician earns while one is pending. That is not a small omission. It belongs in the arithmetic before the ranking does.

On outlook, BLS projects employment of electricians to grow 9 percent from 2025 to 2035, with about 72,700 openings projected each year on average over the decade, and it names rising electricity demand from data centers among the drivers. O*NET publishes a different projection vintage for the same occupation, 2024–34. Those two sets should not be compared against each other, and every outlook number in this post comes from the 2025–35 set.

What these numbers leave out

Three things, and they all push in the same direction. OEWS wages are straight-time gross pay exclusive of premium pay, so overtime, shift differentials and non-production bonuses are absent from every figure above - a real limitation for a trade that bills a great deal of overtime. OEWS also excludes the self-employed, which means the electrician running a two-truck shop is missing from all fifty-one state medians here, and that is part of why the OEWS employment count of 757,220 for May 2025 sits below the Occupational Outlook Handbook's 821,000 jobs for 2025. The May 2025 estimates also combine six semiannual survey panels collected over three years, reaching back to November 2022, with wages updated to the reference period rather than freshly measured in each panel.

If you are applying for this role

Search more than one title. The same work is posted as Electrician, Journeyman Electrician, maintenance electrician and industrial electrician, and the industry attached to the posting moves the money further than the wording does - filter for government, manufacturing and utility employers alongside electrical contractors if you want the $79,820 end of that table rather than the $61,570 end.

Anchor on your metro, not your state. If the job is in Peoria, the honest comparison is $80,460 and not Illinois's $99,560; if it is in Los Angeles, it is $73,810 and not California's $76,160. Bring the metro figure into the conversation and you are arguing from the same data the employer has.

Then ask one question before you accept. How is overtime paid, and at what threshold - because every number in this post excludes it, and the difference between two offers with identical base rates can be entirely the premium-pay structure underneath them. If you are sending the same license number, apprenticeship dates and code certifications into a dozen contractor portals this month, HeroApply fills the application from your resume so those details arrive the same way every time.