Helpers--Electricians Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($31,200) to the 90th ($56,770). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 64,440 people in May 2024, 0.04% of every job BLS counted. Texas is the largest employer at 8,170 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 34.2% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Maine, whose location quotient of 4.14 says this work is 4.14 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $36,400 at the 25th percentile, $39,890 at the middle, $47,520 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $25,570, a ratio of 1.8 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Texas first at 8,170 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Rhode Island would lead at $60,860. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Helpers--Electricians stands number 345 by employment and number 706 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Construction and Extraction Occupations, the group median wage is $54,660 across 60 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 27% less than its group median, and it supplies 1.0% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 23 of the 48 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $39,890, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 4,720 jobs, 7.3% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $27,030 a year, against $53,180 in Portland-South Portland, ME. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $3,324 a month before tax, $1,534 biweekly, $767 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($36,400) to the 75th ($47,520) is worth $11,120 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $43,879 would sit between the median ($39,890) and the 75th percentile ($47,520), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $36,400, is $3,490 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Construction and Extraction Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Rail-Track Laying and Maintenance Equipment Operators, Helpers--Brickmasons, Blockmasons, Stonemasons, and Tile and Marble Setters, Carpet Installers, Continuous Mining Machine Operators, Reinforcing Iron and Rebar Workers, Rotary Drill Operators, Oil and Gas. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.