What is the national median wage for electricians?

In the May 2025 OEWS estimates, the national median annual wage for electricians (SOC 47-2111) is $63,190. The hourly median is $30.38. The 10th percentile is $42,640, the 90th is $108,510, the mean is $71,490, and employment is 757,220.

Are helpers and apprentices included in the electrician wage?

Helpers--electricians are a separate occupation, SOC 47-3013. Their national median is $42,670. The May 2025 occupation definitions say apprentice workers are classified with the skilled trade they are learning, so an apprentice electrician is in the electrician occupation, not in the helper occupation.

Why is electrician pay in Chicago so far above Dallas if prices are similar?

The May 2025 median is $102,350 in Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN and $59,010 in Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX. The 2024 all-items regional price parities are 103.595 and 103.090. In national prices those medians are about $98,798 and $57,241. The price levels are close. The wages are not.

How do alarm installer wages compare?

Security and fire alarm systems installers are SOC 49-2098, and the electrician definition excludes them. Their May 2025 national median is $60,070, against $63,190 for electricians. Employment is 86,340.

Published by Salary by Metro · Updated October 21, 2026

Electrician pay by metro

Q: Do the published electrician wages include overtime?

No. OEWS wages are straight-time gross pay and exclude overtime pay and shift differentials. The May 2025 technical notes at https://www.bls.gov/oes/2025/may/oes_tec.htm list those exclusions. The hourly median is the straight-time rate, not a time-and-a-half rate.

Chicago and Dallas have almost the same prices. Their electrician medians do not.

A U.S. Navy construction electrician cutting conduit at Naval Air Station Jacksonville while another electrician stands by — Construction Electrician 2nd Class Anthony R. Vigilotti cuts conduit at Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Florida, on May 22, 2003. Construction Electrician 3rd Class Antonio B. Toles stands by. Photograph by Photographer's Mate 3rd Class Rich W. Williams, U.S. Navy. Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

A search for electrician pay usually wants one number for one city. The May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics estimates, released May 15, 2026, do not work that way. Electricians are SOC 47-2111. Helpers are a different occupation. Security and fire alarm installers are a third. The wage on an electrician page is straight-time pay for wage-and-salary workers in that one occupation, in the metropolitan area named in the BLS title. It is not a union scale, and it is not the check after overtime.

Who is in the electrician row

The May 2025 occupation definitions, the 2018 Standard Occupational Classification text OEWS uses, are posted with the survey documentation at https://www.bls.gov/oes/oes_doc.htm and in the occupation file at https://download.bls.gov/pub/time.series/oe/oe.occupation. Electricians install, maintain, and repair electrical wiring, equipment, and fixtures. They make sure the work meets the relevant codes. The definition includes installing or servicing street lights, intercom systems, or electrical control systems. It excludes security and fire alarm systems installers, SOC 49-2098. A solar photovoltaic electrician stays in the electrician occupation. A worker whose job is the alarm system does not.

Helpers--Electricians, SOC 47-3013, are the people who help by doing less-skilled work: using, supplying, or holding materials or tools, and cleaning the work area and equipment. The same definition says apprentice workers are classified with the skilled construction trade they are learning, the occupations from 47-2011 through 47-2231. An apprentice electrician is in the electrician row. A helper is not. Construction laborers who do not primarily assist electricians are construction laborers, SOC 47-2061, not helpers. Nationally, in the May 2025 estimates, helpers--electricians number 63,630. The annual median is $42,670. The hourly median is $20.51. The 10th percentile is $33,020 and the 90th is $58,340. The electrician median sits $20,520 above the helper median. Quoting the helper wage as the electrician wage, or the other way around, is a different occupation.

Security and fire alarm systems installers are the exclusion named in the electrician definition. National employment is 86,340. The annual median is $60,070 and the hourly median is $28.88. The 10th percentile is $38,800 and the 90th is $81,150. That median is $3,120 under the electrician median. The jobs are close enough in ordinary speech, and far enough apart in the table, that a city page for one should not be cited as the other.

The count is wage-and-salary employment at establishments. The May 2025 technical notes, at https://www.bls.gov/oes/2025/may/oes_tec.htm, say the survey does not include the self-employed, owners and partners in unincorporated firms, household workers, or unpaid family workers. An electrician working as an unincorporated sole proprietor is outside the 757,220 national employment figure. The tables are at https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm.

The national electrician row

National employment for electricians is 757,220. The annual 10th percentile is $42,640, the 25th is $49,430, the median is $63,190, the 75th is $83,940, and the 90th is $108,510. The mean is $71,490. The hourly median is $30.38. Half of the measured wages fall between $49,430 and $83,940. The mean is $8,300 above the median, so the high end of the distribution lifts the average above the middle wage. The all-occupations national median in the same release is $50,980. The electrician median is above that, and it is still a distribution. The note on median and mean pay is the place for the difference between those two columns. The note on percentiles is the place for what the 10th and the 90th are. Both an hourly wage and an annual wage are published for this occupation. The pages show both. They do not turn one into the other by multiplying by 2,080.

Chicago and Dallas, with almost the same prices

Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN is one of the large metros where the electrician median pulls away from the national figure. May 2025 employment is 17,720. The annual 10th percentile is $49,890, the 25th is $74,400, the median is $102,350, the 75th is $118,660, and the 90th is $124,070. The mean is $94,450. The hourly median is $49.21. The mean sits $7,900 below the median. The lower half of the Chicago distribution is doing that work: the 10th percentile is $52,460 under the median, and the 90th is $21,720 over it. The average is not a typical Chicago wage, and it is not a disguised version of the median.

The Chicago title crosses into Indiana. The wage is for the whole metropolitan area. The comparison with a state uses Illinois, the primary state on the BLS area record. The Illinois median for electricians is $99,560, and Illinois employment is 23,120. That is not an Indiana state wage. Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX is a single-state area. Employment is 20,930. The 10th percentile is $38,740, the 25th is $47,530, the median is $59,010, the 75th is $71,390, and the 90th is $81,660. The mean is $59,960. The hourly median is $28.37. The Texas median is $58,570, and Texas employment is 76,770. Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX is close to Dallas on this occupation: employment 19,730, median $59,180, hourly median $28.45. Dallas and Houston together are 40,660 of those 76,770 Texas jobs, about 53 percent of the state estimate. The two Texas metros are inside Texas. The Chicago metro is not inside Illinois alone, so the same kind of share is not available for Chicago and Illinois.

The price comparison uses the Bureau of Economic Analysis all-items regional price parities for 2024, released February 19, 2026. The series page is https://www.bea.gov/data/prices-inflation/regional-price-parities-state-and-metro-area. The United States is 100. Chicago-Naperville-Elgin is 103.595. Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington is 103.090. The Chicago index is half a point higher. On a scale that sets the country at 100, that is about half of one percent. Divide the Chicago median of $102,350 by 103.595 and multiply by 100. The result is $98,798 in national prices, rounded to the nearest dollar. Divide the Dallas median of $59,010 by 103.090 and multiply by 100. That is $57,241. The nominal gap is $102,350 minus $59,010, or $43,340. The gap in national prices is $98,798 minus $57,241, or $41,557. Moving from the paycheck to national prices does not turn this into a cost-of-living story.

The other direction is the offer that holds purchasing power constant. A wage of $102,350 in Chicago has about the same purchasing power as $101,851 in Dallas. That is $102,350 times 103.090 divided by 103.595, rounded to the nearest dollar. The published Dallas median is $59,010, not $101,851. The other way, $59,010 in Dallas has about the purchasing power of $59,299 in Chicago. Matching Chicago purchasing power in Dallas means paying close to the Chicago median, because the price parities are close. Matching the Dallas median means paying the local cost of labor. Those are different policies. The comparison tool runs the same arithmetic when the occupation and the two metros are selected. The wages are May 2025. The parities are 2024. The guide to comparing pay across metros is the general method. The guide to cost of labor and cost of living walks a different pair, San Francisco and Houston, where prices do more of the work.

Other large metros

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ has the largest electrician employment in the release, 36,550. The median is $79,020, the hourly median is $37.99, the 10th percentile is $46,170, and the 90th is $132,170. The mean is $88,670. The wage covers the whole multi-state area, including the New Jersey counties in the title. The state comparison uses New York. The New York median is $78,750, and New York employment is 40,130. The metro employment is not a New York-only count, and the state median is not a New Jersey median. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA publishes a median of $73,810, an hourly median of $35.49, a 10th percentile of $46,140, a 90th of $131,680, and employment of 20,610. The California median is $76,160, with employment of 73,310. The state figure sits near the Los Angeles metro figure and well under the San Francisco metro figure, so a California number is a poor stand-in for every California job.

San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA publishes a median of $92,830, an hourly median of $44.63, and employment of 9,060. The 2024 all-items parity there is 115.613. Divide $92,830 by 115.613 and multiply by 100: $80,294 in national prices. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA publishes a median of $101,780, an hourly median of $48.93, and employment of 9,750. The parity is 111.133. Divide $101,780 by 111.133 and multiply by 100: $91,584 in national prices. The Washington median is $95,220. Seattle's nominal median is close to Chicago's. After prices it is not. Chicago at $98,798 in national prices is still above Seattle at $91,584, and both remain far above Dallas at $57,241. None of these sentences is a claim that Chicago publishes the highest electrician median in the country. Smaller areas publish medians too, and a small employment count can sit on a noisy estimate. The figures above are the large areas with a published median, an employment count, and a price parity.

Five of those large areas, New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago, employ 36,550, 20,930, 20,610, 19,730, and 17,720 electricians. The sum is 115,540 of the national 757,220, or 15.3 percent. The rest of the occupation is spread across the other metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas in the release. A national median is the wrong citation for a job in one of the five, and a single metro median is the wrong citation for the occupation as a whole.

Overtime is not in the cell

The technical notes draw the boundary around the wage. Included: the base rate, cost-of-living allowances, guaranteed pay, hazardous-duty pay, incentive pay including commissions and production bonuses, and tips. Excluded: overtime pay, severance pay, shift differentials, nonproduction bonuses, the employer's cost for supplementary benefits, and tuition reimbursements. A time-and-a-half hour is premium pay. It is not in the median, the mean, or the percentiles. The table cannot say how much of one electrician's year was overtime. It describes straight-time gross pay for the occupation in the area.

Quote 47-2111 when the job is an electrician. Quote 47-3013 for a helper. Quote 49-2098 for an alarm installer. Apprentices in the trade are classified with electricians, not with helpers.
Quote the metro median for the workplace, using the full BLS area title. The Chicago wage covers the Illinois and Indiana counties in Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN.
Use the 2024 all-items parity when the question is purchasing power. Chicago at 103.595 and Dallas at 103.090 do not explain a $43,340 gap in the median.
Leave a blank cell blank. If BLS did not publish a percentile, the page says it is not available. The national median is not a substitute.

Electricians, national wages · Electricians in Chicago · Electricians in Dallas · Electricians in Houston · Electricians in New York · Electricians in Los Angeles · Electricians in Seattle · Electricians in San Francisco · Helpers, electricians · Security and fire alarm installers · Compare electrician pay, Chicago and Dallas · Comparing pay across metros · Cost of labor and cost of living · Hourly and annual wages · Truck driver pay by metro