What Are the Highest Paying Trades?

Elevator and escalator installers are the highest paying trade in the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook, measured by median pay, with electrical power-line installers close behind. Both are learned through a paid registered apprenticeship rather than a degree. The full ranking below pairs each trade with its typical apprenticeship term and the license or certificate that gates journey-level pay.

The order comes from median annual pay in the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH), the federal dataset every serious trade-pay list is built on. Median means half of workers in the occupation earn more and half earn less, so it describes an experienced, journey-level worker, not a first-year apprentice.

One honest caveat that most ranking pages skip: the OOH updates its figures every year, and a dollar amount printed in an article goes stale fast. The rank order barely moves from year to year. So this page gives you the stable part, the order, the entry path, and the credential each trade requires, and points you to the OOH occupation page when you want the current dollar figure.

What counts as a trade here: a skilled manual occupation you enter through an apprenticeship, a trade school program, or an employer-sponsored credential. That excludes roles some lists sneak in to inflate their numbers, like sonographers and respiratory therapists, which require an associate degree and belong on a healthcare list, not a trades list.

The top two deserve a closer look, because they win for different reasons.

Elevator work pays the most because the supply of workers is deliberately small. Apprenticeship classes are limited, entry requires an aptitude test, and many states license elevator mechanics the way they license electricians. Tight supply plus buildings that cannot legally run an out-of-code elevator equals pricing power for the people who can fix them.

Line work pays nearly as much for a different reason: the job is dangerous, outdoors, and on call. When a storm takes down a grid, linemen work restoration shifts at overtime and premium rates, which is why the gap between a lineman's base scale and actual W-2 earnings can be enormous.

Aircraft mechanics are the outlier in how you enter. There is no apprenticeship percentage scale; you either complete an FAA-approved program or document supervised work experience, then pass the written, oral, and practical exams for the Airframe and Powerplant certificate. The A&P is federal, so it travels across all fifty states, which none of the state trade licenses on this list do.

The medians above describe journey-level workers. An apprentice earns less, but earns from day one, and the raise schedule is written into the program before you start.

Registered apprenticeships listed on apprenticeship.gov set apprentice wages as a percentage of journey-level scale, rising in scheduled steps as you log on-the-job hours and complete classroom instruction. You do not negotiate these raises and your employer cannot skip them; they are part of the program standards. Union programs typically add health coverage and pension contributions during training.

This is the structural advantage of the trades over a degree: the training years are paid years. A four-year electrical apprentice finishes with a license, four years of income, and no student debt, while a four-year degree holder finishes with a credential and, usually, a loan balance. When you compare career earnings, count both sides of that ledger.

Two electricians with the same license can earn wildly different amounts. The median hides five variables that matter more than the trade you pick.

The highest paying trade is not automatically the best trade to learn, because the doors are different sizes. Weigh how long qualification takes, and how hard the program is to get into, against where the pay lands.

In most of these trades, pay steps up when a credential does. Employers are not paying for years served; they are paying for what you are legally allowed to sign off on.

Notice the pattern: the trades at the top of the ranking are the ones with the hardest gates. A license restricts supply, and restricted supply is what a high median pay figure actually measures.

None of these trades require a degree, and none of them care that you spent five years doing something else. Apprenticeship programs select on an aptitude test, usually math-heavy, an interview, and reliability signals, not on a linear resume.

Practical moves that work. Take a pre-apprenticeship or helper job to get trade-adjacent hours and a foreman who will vouch for you. Apply to several programs at once, because union apprenticeships often take cohorts only once or twice a year and a single application can mean a year of waiting. Brush up on algebra and fractions before the test; it is the most common reason otherwise strong applicants wash out of selection.

A mixed work history helps more than people expect. Service trades like HVAC and plumbing put a worker in a customer's home, so retail and customer-facing experience reads as an asset. Military experience often earns direct-entry credit toward apprenticeship hours. If you are planning the move deliberately, our career change guide covers the decision and transition end to end, and there is a dedicated guide to writing a career change resume that gets interviews.

For licensed trades, the license is the headline. Put it in a certifications section near the top, with the issuing state, license number, and expiration, and repeat the credential in your resume title line: "Journeyman Electrician, State of Ohio." A recruiter filtering applicants for a licensed role searches for the license name first; where exactly to place it depends on the posting, and we break that down in where to put certifications on a resume.

If you are mid-apprenticeship, logged hours are your strongest number. State them the way your program logs them: on-the-job hours completed, classroom hours completed, and your current step. A contractor hiring a third-year apprentice wants to know exactly how far you are from journeyman, so tell them.

Journey-level applicants should quantify the work itself: service calls per week, callback rate, size and type of installs, code inspections passed. Job postings for higher-paid trade roles name specific credentials and systems, and missing one exact term can filter you out before a human reads the page. Roleframe's fit report shows how your resume scores against a specific posting and which required keywords, like a certification name or equipment type, you have not written down; here is how to check your resume against a job description. Submit the finished resume as a PDF so your formatting survives whatever system the contractor uses.