How to become an electrician in 2026

Electricians make a median of $63,190, or $30.38 an hour, on the Bureau of Labor Statistics count, about $2,180 above the HVAC technician median. The ceiling is meaningfully higher: the top tenth of electricians reach $108,510 against $95,210 for HVAC. The floor is slightly higher too, $42,640 against $40,050.

With 757,220 jobs this is the largest skilled trade on this site apart from general maintenance, and unlike HVAC it is licensed in essentially every state. That combination, a large workforce and a universal licence, is why electrical work has the most standardised training route of any trade covered here, and why an electrician moving between states carries something an HVAC technician often cannot.

The distribution is slightly bottom-heavy compared with plumbing. The first quartile sits at $49,430, below the plumbing figure of $50,190, while the ninetieth percentiles are within $100 of each other. A large trade with a universal apprenticeship takes in a lot of people at the bottom each year, which pulls the lower quartile down without affecting what an experienced electrician earns.

Whether an HVAC technician should retrain as an electrician turns on how much the two trades already overlap in practice, and it is more than most people expect. A large part of HVAC service work is electrical diagnosis, and OSHA training is common to both trades, and several states on this site exempt HVAC licence holders from a separate electrical credential for disconnecting and reconnecting existing equipment, precisely because the boundary is blurred. Montana exempts work at 90 volts or less, which covers thermostat and control wiring outright.

What retraining buys is not the $2,180 difference in medians. It is a licence that transfers across state lines, a much larger employer base, a higher ceiling if you reach the top decile, and access to utility and manufacturing work that pays six figures. What it costs is starting a new apprenticeship in a trade that, unlike HVAC in much of the country, will not let you work unsupervised until you have finished one.

The geography rewards different places from HVAC, which is worth knowing before moving for it. Portland pays electricians a median of $105,090 and Mount Vernon in Washington $104,510 while employing them at nearly three times the national rate. Those are semiconductor and data centre markets. Chicago pays $102,350 and Seattle $101,780.