The numbers behind the report

What this report measures

The report asks where electrician pay goes furthest without hiding the underlying tradeoffs inside one proprietary score. It publishes nominal pay, cost-adjusted pay, housing workdays, employment concentration, and—where the ACS sample supports publication—hours, commuting, self-employment, and effective hourly earnings.

Population and geography

• OEWS occupation: SOC 47-2111, Electricians.
• ACS PUMS occupation: OCCP 6355, Electricians.
• ACS employee estimate: currently employed workers (ESR 1-2) with class-of-worker codes 1-5.
• ACS self-employment estimate: currently employed workers with COW 6-7, reported as a share of COW 1-7.
• State release: 50 states and the District of Columbia.
• Metro release: the 100 metropolitan areas with the largest published May 2025 OEWS electrician employment estimate.

Core calculations

Real Payoff = OEWS median hourly wage ÷ (BEA all-items RPP / 100). It is expressed in national-price-level dollars per hour. It is a purchasing-power comparison, not a promised paycheck.

Housing Workdays = HUD monthly 50th-percentile gross rent ÷ OEWS median hourly wage ÷ 8. It estimates eight-hour days of gross pay needed to cover one month of rent. It does not subtract taxes or other expenses.

HUD county rents are aggregated with ACS B25003 renter-household weights. When HUD splits a county into subcounty areas, the county renter weight is allocated using HUD's 2023 population field. The sensitivity file compares this result with a simple unweighted county average.

Effective Hourly Earnings = ACS inflation-adjusted annual wage and salary income ÷ (usual weekly hours × weeks worked). Records with nonpositive wages, hours, or weeks are excluded.

ACS weighting and uncertainty

All ACS person estimates use PWGTP. Ninety-percent margins of error use all 80 replicate weights and Census's successive-difference-replication formula: MOE = 1.645 × sqrt((4/80) × Σ(replicate estimate − full estimate)²).

ACS values are suppressed when the unweighted sample is below 100 or the 90% margin of error exceeds 30% of the estimate. Samples of 100-199 are published with a caution flag. BLS-suppressed values remain missing and are never imputed.

Balanced leaders, not an overall score

State balanced leaders must be in the top quartile for Real Payoff, bottom quartile for one-bedroom Housing Workdays, and at or below the national electrician long-hours share (16.3%). Metro balanced leaders must meet the first two conditions. These labels identify agreement across measures; they are not a weighted composite ranking.

Comparability limits

OEWS and ACS answer different questions. OEWS is the primary wage/employment source and excludes self-employed workers; ACS supplies worker-level characteristics over 2020-2024 and includes sampling error. HUD rent is a standardized gross-rent benchmark, not an asking-rent feed. The report is descriptive, uses gross pay, and does not model taxes, licensing rules, benefits, union coverage, overtime premiums, or individual experience.