Twenty-two jobs pay well above that line. Five of them cost nothing at all to get into, because the industry pays you while it trains you. Every figure here comes from the federal government's own surveys, and the sources are listed at the end.
This is the middle of each job. Half the people doing it earn more than this, half earn less. The colour tells you how they got in, and the dashed line is where the rest of the country sits.
Take any one job and the spread is wide. The pale bar runs from the lowest tenth to the highest, and the solid part is the middle half, which is where most people actually sit. Someone starting out is near the left end of it.
This is what you pay to reach the starting line. Two of them run the other way and pay you instead.
An elevator apprentice earns 40 to 50 percent of journeyman scale from the first morning, and climbs every year after that. A trainee at the FAA Academy is on the federal payroll at $22.61 an hour while learning. Neither one borrows a dollar to do it.
Counted in months, from the day you start to the day the work starts paying you. For three of them that gap is zero, which changes what you can afford to attempt.
How much bigger each job gets between 2025 and 2035. Worth knowing, though a job growing slowly can still have plenty of openings, because people retire out of it faster than the total changes.
Openings a year in construction and extraction. Most of them are not new jobs, they are people leaving.
More construction workers the industry says it needs to hire this year alone.
Manufacturing jobs to fill by 2033. Around half are expected to go unfilled.
Years of saving to reach a million dollars, at three different savings rates. It assumes about 72 percent of the wage reaches your hand and 7 percent a year in return after inflation. Change either one and the numbers move, but the shape of it does not.
Half of everyone doing the job earns less than the figure shown. Someone new starts near the bottom of the range, not the middle of it.
Power-line workers died on the job at a rate of 19 to 24 per 100,000 across 2011 to 2015. For all American workers the rate was 3.3 to 3.5. That gap is part of the wage.
Apprenticeships recruit in windows, often once every two years, and close as soon as the list is full. Nobody writes to tell you one opened. See which elevator apprenticeships are taking applications.
The Labor Department puts it plainly: 94 percent of people who complete a registered apprenticeship are still employed afterwards, on an average salary of $84,000.
Nobody advertises these jobs, because nobody needs your tuition to run them. That is the only reason you hadn't seen this page before.