Contractor Hourly Rate by Trade: What BLS Wages Turn Into

What do BLS wages say each trade earns per hour?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes national hourly wages for each occupation in its Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey. The table pulls the May 2025 figures for 27 trades and freelance occupations, the latest the BLS API returned on 2026-10-29. Median electricians earn $30.38 an hour; median animal caretakers earn $17.00.

Median is the middle worker: half earn more, half less. Mean is pulled up by high earners, which is why it sits above the median in every row. Use the median for a first estimate and the 90th percentile as the ceiling for experienced, licensed work.

Why is a wage not the same as a rate?

A wage is what an employer pays one hour of a worker's time. A rate is what a customer pays for one hour of billed work. The gap between them has three parts: employer taxes on the wage, the margin the business needs, and the paid hours nobody bills for, such as driving, quoting, and shop time.

Employer-side Social Security and Medicare tax is 7.65% of wages (6.2% plus 1.45%), per the IRS Topic 751. That is the only burden this study adds, because it is the only one that is the same for every trade and state. Workers' compensation, general liability, vehicle, tools, software and the owner's own pay are real and are not in these numbers. Add them with your own figures in the free job pricing calculator.

How much do you multiply a wage by to get a quote rate?

Multiply the wage by 1.66 to price one paid hour at a 35% margin, and by 2.55 to price one billable hour when 65% of paid hours are billed. The multiplier is the same for every trade, because the three steps are percentages. Only the wage changes.

The formula is wage times (1 plus FICA), divided by (1 minus margin), divided by the billable share. The grid shows how far the multiplier moves when you change the two assumptions you control.

Read across: a 50% billable share and a 50% margin need about 4.3 times the wage. Read down: raising the billable share from 50% to 80% cuts the needed rate by more than a third. Scheduling tighter does more than haggling over margin.

What does each trade's median wage turn into?

Applying the base case to every median gives the table below. These are floors, not market prices: they cover the wage, employer FICA and a margin. They exclude every other cost of running the business, so a real quote sits above them.

The spread across trades is large. The top row, web developers, prices at $73.77 per paid hour; the bottom row, animal caretakers, at $28.15. A flat "standard" hourly rate across jobs of different skill hides that.

How does the formula work on one real number?

Take the electrician median of $30.38. Add 7.65% employer FICA and the loaded cost is $32.70 for one paid hour. Divide by 0.65 (a 35% margin) and the price is $50.31.

The calculator below runs the same arithmetic with your inputs. Replace the wage with what you pay, add materials and your yearly overhead, and the quote updates.

Which trades have the widest pay spread, and why does it matter?

A wide gap between the 10th and 90th percentile means skill, licence or location moves the rate a lot. Film and video editors have the widest spread in this set: the 90th percentile is 3.7 times the 10th. Janitors and cleaners have the narrowest, at 1.8 times.

For pricing, a wide spread is a warning not to copy a national median. Price from your own wage and your own local costs. Use the national figure to check that your number is not far below what the trade pays its employees.

What mistakes make a quote rate too low?

Most under-pricing comes from four errors. Quoting the wage as the rate. Counting every paid hour as billable. Adding a percentage markup on cost when the target is a margin on price. Leaving owner time out of the wage line.

OEWS covers employees. It does not include owners and the self-employed, so the owner's own pay is not in any row. If you work the jobs yourself, put a wage in that line anyway. The markup versus margin guide shows why 35% added to cost is not a 35% margin, and the labor burden guide covers the costs beyond FICA.

How to use these numbers in a price sheet

Pick your trade, take the median, then replace each assumption with your own. Put the wage, burden, billable share and margin in labelled cells so they can change in one place. The free job pricing starter lays that out, and the contractor pricing guide walks through a full job with materials and overhead.

If you want the sheet shaped to your trades and rates, the custom build does that. Treat everything on this page as a starting point to check against your own books, not as a quote.

The same steps as spreadsheet formulas, with the cell layout in each note:

How was this study built, and what are its limits?

Wages come from BLS OEWS May 2025 national estimates, pulled by series ID through the BLS public API on 2026-10-29. Series IDs have the form OEUN, a national area code, an occupation code, and a data-type code. Median electricians, for example, is series OEUN000000000000047211108, and the 90th percentile is OEUN000000000000047211110. Every price on this page is computed from those wages with the formulas above.

Limits: wages are national, so local rates differ; they cover employees, not owners; the margin and billable share are assumptions that you should replace; and nothing here includes insurance, vehicles, tools, software or taxes beyond FICA.

Step-by-step: Contractor Hourly Rate by Trade: What BLS Wages Turn Into

1. Pick your occupation. Find your trade in the BLS table and note the median hourly wage, or use what you actually pay.
2. Add employer FICA. Multiply the wage by 1.0765 to include the 7.65% employer Social Security and Medicare tax.
3. Add your other burden. Add workers' compensation, insurance, vehicle and tool costs per hour from your own records.
4. Divide by one minus margin. Divide the loaded cost by 0.65 for a 35% margin, or use your own target.
5. Divide by the billable share. Divide again by the share of paid hours you actually bill, such as 0.65, to get a price per billable hour.
6. Check against a job. Run a real job through the calculator with materials and overhead and compare the result to your usual quote.

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