Electrician salary by state: what electricians earn in all 50 states (2026)

What does an electrician make?

The national median is $63,190 a year for electricians, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' May 2025 wage data. State medians run from $49,070 to $101,310 — a spread of roughly $52,240. 29 of 51 jurisdictions pay above the national median.

If you're hiring, the spread is the number that matters more than the average. Posting at your state median in a metro that pays well above it is a common and quiet reason a job sits open for six weeks.

Electrician salary by state

Median annual wage, all 51 jurisdictions, ranked. The gap column compares against the $63,190 national median; the last column is total electricians employed in that state, which tells you how deep the local pool actually is.

Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, occupation 47-2111 (Electricians). Employment figures are state totals; about 757,240 electricians are employed nationally.

The biggest talent pools pay below the median

The most useful thing in that table isn't the top of the ranking. It's this: Texas and Florida employ more electricians than almost anywhere else — 76,770 and 49,700 respectively — and both pay below the national median. Texas alone has more electricians than Oregon, Illinois, Hawaii, Washington, and Alaska combined, the five highest-paying states on the list.

That cuts against the instinct that high pay follows deep talent. It doesn't. The high-median states are mostly high-cost, high-union-density, or both, and several of them (Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, Wyoming) have very small workforces — under 3,000 electricians each. A big median in a small pool is not a hiring market.

For an owner, the practical read: if you're in Texas, Florida, Georgia, or North Carolina, you are hiring in a deep pool at below-median wages, and your competition for those electricians is local, not national. Pay is not your differentiator there and trying to win on it is expensive. Speed and process are.

What the spread actually means for setting pay

Three things worth separating, because they get conflated constantly:

A state median is a floor, not a target. Within-state variation between a major metro and a rural county is routinely larger than the gap between two states. Colorado's $62,230 median tells a Denver contractor very little.

The median is a lagging figure. OEWS data reflects May 2025. In a market where trades wages have been climbing, a year-old median can be under the live rate before you post the job.

Pay is often not the problem. When a job sits open, owners reach for the wage lever first because it's the visible one. But an electrician who applies on Tuesday and hears back Friday has usually taken another offer — the leak is response time, not dollars. That's the same pattern behind why good techs seem impossible to find when they are, in fact, applying.

Where electrician pay sits against the other trades

Electricians ($63,190) and plumbers ($63,800) sit within about $600 of each other at the national median, close enough to call it a tie. The state-level pictures differ more than the national numbers suggest, though — see plumber salary by state and HVAC technician salary by state for the side-by-side, and electrician shortage statistics for why the demand side is tightening faster than the wage data alone shows.

Using this to actually fill a seat

Benchmark to your metro, treat the state median as your floor, and then stop optimizing the number. The businesses that fill electrician roles fastest aren't the ones paying the most — they're the ones with someone already in the pipeline when a truck comes open, so the job starts with a shortlist instead of a blank post and a six-week wait.

Building that bench is a process problem, not a pay problem. If you want to see what it looks like for your market, we'll map your hiring in a short call and tell you plainly whether pay is actually your constraint.