# Methodology — Electrician Payoff Report 2026

## 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.