How Much Should You Pay a New Electrician Apprentice

Set the number as a percentage of your journeyman rate, not a guess pulled from a job board.

Read This First

First-year electrician apprentices typically earn $14 to $22 an hour nationally, with one industry estimate putting the average at about $18.43 an hour.^[3] Those numbers are useful as a sanity check. They are a bad way to actually set a wage. If you already run a profitable shop, the right starting number isn't a figure you copy off a job board. It's a percentage of what you pay your journeymen, and getting that percentage right is what keeps a good first-year hire from walking after eighteen months.

Why the Number Is a Percentage, Not a Dollar Figure

The trade has a useful rule of thumb here, and it's worth using because it scales with your own pay scale instead of a national average that may not match your market. Starting apprentice wages typically run about 50% of a journeyman's rate.^[3] The example the IEC uses is direct: if your average journeyman earns $32 an hour, a starting apprentice lands around $16.^[2] IBEW-side practice tends to start lower, closer to 40% of the journeyman wage.^[4]

That range, roughly 40% to 50%, is the real decision - though where you land within it depends on your local market and how much supervision a new hire needs. Anchor to your own journeyman rate and the starting number sets itself. If you pay your journeymen $32 an hour, a 50% start puts a new apprentice at $16.^[2] If your journeyman rate keeps pace with the local market, the apprentice number rises with it automatically when you adjust journeyman pay. That's the advantage of the percentage - but it only works if your journeyman rate is itself competitive. Anchoring an apprentice to an under-market journeyman wage just creates an under-market apprentice wage.

The Part That Decides Whether They Stay

Apprentices don't leave over the starting number. They leave when the raise schedule is vague. An electrical apprenticeship runs four to five years, combining on-the-job hours with classroom instruction,^[3] and the IEC path specifically requires at least 8,000 hours of OJT and 576 hours of classroom time across four years.^[2] That's a long runway. A first-year who can't see the path from 50% of journeyman to full journeyman scale is a first-year who's already comparing offers.

The money at the top of that runway is real and it's climbing, which is your retention argument. The national mean wage for electricians hit $71,490 per year as of the May 2025 BLS data released in May 2026, an increase of about $3,680 over the 2023 mean of $67,810.^[2]^[5] The median hourly wage was $30.38, meaning half of electricians earned more than that amount and half earned less.^[5] Employment is projected to grow about 9 percent through 2034, with roughly 81,000 openings a year over the decade.^[1] A first-year apprentice who understands they're on a step schedule toward that ceiling has a reason to finish where they started.

What to Set

Start by fixing your own journeyman rate as the anchor, then set the first-year apprentice at 40% to 50% of it depending on how tight your local labor market is. If you're competing hard for green hires, pay toward the 50% end from day one rather than trying to catch up with a raise later. Write down the step increases for each year of the four-to-five-year program before the apprentice's first shift, so the path from starting rate to journeyman scale is on paper, not in a conversation you keep postponing. Tie each raise to hours logged, classroom milestones, and demonstrated skills, since the program already tracks 8,000 OJT hours and 576 classroom hours,^[2] and use those same numbers as your raise triggers. Re-check your anchor rate against the annual BLS wage release, because even a few-thousand-dollar mean-wage jump in one year^[5] means last year's percentage can quietly fall behind the market.

Bottom Line

Set a new apprentice at 40% to 50% of your journeyman rate, write the raise schedule down before day one, and let the percentage move your numbers when the market does.

Sources

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