Nearly every “highest-paying trades” list you will ever read is built on one federal dataset: the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, or OEWS. It is the gold-standard record of what American workers earn — and it carries one exclusion that quietly reshapes the entire ranking. OEWS does not count the self-employed. Not owner-operators, not independent contractors, not the electrician who left a payroll to run her own three-truck shop. In the trades where going out on your own was always the point, the people at the very top of the earnings ladder are not in the data at all.
That single design choice is why the rankings you have read are not wrong so much as cropped — and why the crop hits some trades far harder than others.
What OEWS actually measures — and what it drops
OEWS is an employer survey. Establishments report the wages they pay their employees, and BLS aggregates those into the medians and percentiles everyone quotes. By design, it covers wage-and-salary workers only. As the BLS OEWS documentation states plainly, the survey does not include the self-employed, owners and partners in unincorporated firms, or household workers.
So when a list tells you the “median electrician earns \$62,350,” the precise claim is narrower than it sounds: the median employed electrician on someone else’s payroll earns \$62,350. The master electrician who owns the company signing that paycheck is nowhere in the number. For a desk job, that distinction barely matters — almost everyone is an employee. For a trade whose classic career arc ends in ownership, it changes the whole picture.
The tell is hiding in the percentiles
OEWS publishes more than a median. It reports the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentile wage for each occupation — roughly, the bottom, the middle, and the top of the employee distribution. Line them up and two very different shapes appear (all figures BLS OEWS, May 2024, wage-and-salary workers only):
| Trade | 10th pct | Median | 90th pct |
|---|---|---|---|
| Owner-path trades | |||
| Electricians | \$39,430 | \$62,350 | \$106,030 |
| Plumbers & pipefitters | \$40,670 | \$62,970 | \$105,150 |
| HVAC technicians | \$39,130 | \$59,810 | \$91,020 |
| Carpenters | \$38,760 | \$59,310 | \$98,370 |
| Employee-only trades | |||
| Elevator installers | \$54,720 | \$106,580 | \$149,250 |
| Power-line installers | \$50,020 | \$92,560 | \$126,610 |
| Aircraft mechanics | \$47,790 | \$78,680 | \$120,080 |
| Wind turbine techs | \$49,110 | \$62,580 | \$88,090 |
For the top group, the 90th-percentile figure is close to the real ceiling. Elevator mechanics, power-line workers, aircraft techs, and wind-turbine techs are almost all employees — of a construction contractor, a utility, an airline, an energy company. There is no large hidden population of self-employed elevator installers running solo. What OEWS captures is very nearly the whole trade, top included.
For the bottom group, the 90th-percentile figure is the top of the employee distribution and nothing more. The electrician earning \$106,030 at the 90th percentile is the best-paid electrician who still works for someone else. Above that line sit the owners — the ones the survey was never designed to see. The construction and finishing trades carry some of the highest self-employment rates of any occupational group in the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, which means the missing slice is not a rounding error. It is a whole tier of the trade.
Why this quietly flips the rankings
Follow the exclusion through and the standard “highest-paying trades” ranking starts to look like a survivorship artifact. The trades that top the OEWS lists — elevator installers, line workers, aircraft mechanics — are disproportionately the ones where the entire earning population is captured, top and all. Their high median is real, and it is fully visible.
The owner-path trades land lower on the same lists in part because the survey stops at the employee ceiling and the owners never enter the frame. This is the opposite of the story most people assume when they see “plumbers: \$62,970” sitting below “elevator installers: \$106,580.” It is not that plumbing tops out lower. It is that the plumber who tops out highest — the one who owns the company — was subtracted before the median was ever calculated. Our companion piece on why the median wage isn’t what you’ll earn makes the same point from the other end of the distribution: the median hides the floor for new apprentices, and here it also hides the ceiling for owners.
The barrier the rankings never mention
None of this makes the employee-only trades a worse bet — the opposite, in raw wage terms. An electrician at the 90th percentile earns about \$106,030; an elevator installer earns roughly that at the median. Across the whole distribution, the high-floor employee trades genuinely pay more. So why doesn’t everyone become an elevator installer?
Because getting in is the entire contest. The trades with the highest, most compressed wages are the ones that throttle entry hardest — small apprentice classes, restricted union intake, long waiting lists. The wage is high partly because the door is narrow. The real choice a trade presents is rarely “high floor now versus high ceiling later.” It is closer to this: a high, capped employee wage you may wait years to even be admitted to, versus a more modest employee wage attached to a trade where the ownership ceiling is real but invisible in the data. The six-figure electrician headlines from the data-center boom are a version of the same trap — a specialized, hard-to-enter tail sold as if it were the typical wage.
How to read a trade wage before you commit
You do not need a labor economist to correct for the crop. Three questions get you most of the way:
- Is this an employee-only trade or an owner-path trade? If almost everyone in the field works for a company, utility, or airline, the OEWS 75th and 90th percentiles are close to your realistic ceiling. If independent operators are common — electrical, plumbing, HVAC, masonry, carpentry, auto repair — the published median is an employee floor with the owner tier cropped off.
- If it is an owner-path trade, look at ownership separately. The OEWS number will not show you what a shop owner clears. Self-employment share and small-contractor income live in other data — the Census, the American Community Survey, IRS Schedule C aggregates — and that is where the real ceiling of these trades hides.
- If it is an employee-only trade, price in the door. A high, fully-captured wage usually comes with restricted entry. Ask how many apprentices the local program takes each year and how long the queue is before you count on the paycheck.
From there, the site’s trade-by-trade wage pages and rankings give you the OEWS percentiles for any specific field, and the broader trade school versus college ROI comparison puts the whole decision in context.
The bottom line
The median on a “best trades” list answers one question honestly: what do employees in this trade earn? For half the trades on the list — the elevator installers and line workers, where nearly everyone is on a payroll — that is the whole story, and it is a good one. For the other half — the trades where the goal was always to run the job, not just work it — the number is a floor with the ceiling cropped out of frame. Before you pick a trade off a ranking, figure out which half you are looking at. The data will not tell you unless you ask.
Frequently asked questions
Does BLS OEWS really exclude the self-employed?
Yes. OEWS is an establishment survey of wages paid to employees. It explicitly excludes the self-employed, owners and partners in unincorporated businesses, and household workers. That is a scope choice, not a flaw — but it means the data describes the employee side of every trade, not the ownership side.
So are self-employed tradespeople automatically paid more?
Not automatically. Ownership adds income potential but also risk, unpaid administrative time, and far more variance — some owners clear well above any employee wage, others earn less than the journeymen they employ. The point is not that owners always win; it is that they are absent from the number, so a trade’s upside can be systematically understated.
Which trades have the most self-employment?
Directionally, the construction and finishing trades — carpenters, electricians, plumbers, painters, masonry — along with auto repair, carry some of the higher self-employment rates in the skilled workforce. Trades tied to a single employer type, such as elevator installation, line work, and commercial aviation maintenance, have very little. The BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook notes self-employment for each occupation.
If OEWS misses owners, what data shows their income?
Self-employment income surfaces in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the Survey of Income and Program Participation, and IRS Schedule C aggregates rather than in OEWS. None is as clean as the OEWS percentile table, which is exactly why most “highest-paying trades” lists quietly ignore the owner tier — the convenient data leaves it out.