Electrician apprentice pay

Apprentice versus helper

Posts titled apprentice offer $2.50 an hour more at the median than posts titled helper. The bigger difference is what comes after. An apprentice is in a program that leads to a journeyman license, with classroom hours and a schedule of raises. A helper usually does similar work with no program behind it.

BLS reports helpers on their own: a median of $20.51 an hour (BLS, SOC 47-3013, May 2025). It has no separate figure for apprentices, who are counted with electricians.

How apprentice pay rises

Registered apprenticeship programs pay on a schedule that rises as you complete work hours and classes, usually set as a percentage of the journeyman rate. Each program sets its own steps, so ask for the schedule before you sign. The Apprenticeship Finder lists registered programs near you.

The raise at the end matters most. The median journeyman post offers $39.65, which is $16.65 an hour more than the median apprentice post, or about $34,600 over a full year.

When you compare offers, look past the hourly rate. 35 of the 63 apprentice posts mention school, classes, tuition or an apprenticeship program. An employer that pays for your classes is paying you twice.

Apprentice pay by state

California is the only state with enough apprentice posts to report on its own: a median of $25.25 an hour (10 posts from 6 employers).

How apprentices register and log hours differs by state. Start with your state's page in the electrician licensing guide, and see the journeyman pay by state for where the apprenticeship leads.

What to offer an apprentice

The middle of the posted market for apprentices and helpers is $21.00 to $26.75 an hour. An offer under $21.00 is in the bottom quarter of what other employers post.

Say which apprenticeship program the hire will join and who pays for classes. More than half of the apprentice posts here mention school or an apprenticeship program.

Questions

How these figures are made

• Every posted figure comes from job posts on Best Electrician Jobs where the employer entered a pay range. Pay that appears only inside a job description is not counted.
• Only hourly pay is counted, using the midpoint of each range. Ranges under $15 or over $120 an hour are dropped, and so are ranges whose top is more than twice the bottom, because those span different jobs.
• A job posted in several cities counts once, and no company counts more than three times in any figure.
• Jobs are grouped by title. A row appears only with at least 10 posts from 5 employers. A headline figure needs 20 posts from 10 employers, and a middle-half range needs 30 posts.
• Yearly figures are the hourly rate times 2,080 hours, rounded to the nearest $100.
• Posted pay is what employers offer in their ads, not what workers end up earning. Government figures come from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, May 2025.

Figures as of November 13, 2026.