Apprentices Get Paid From Day One And Finish Debt-Free. Only Some Trades Lead Anywhere.
Co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist
Fewer than 35 percent of people who start a registered apprenticeship in the United States actually finish one, according to 2021 Department of Labor data cited in a 2023 research brief from the American Institutes for Research, produced with the electrical training ALLIANCE. That figure sits underneath a genuinely rare selling point: registered apprentices earn a wage from their first day on the job, following a training pay scale, and pay no tuition, since the program is funded by the employer sponsoring it rather than the apprentice.
The completion rate isn't evenly spread. DOL's 2021 data found Black apprentices completed their programs at a rate of 24 percent, compared with 33 percent for white apprentices and 30 percent for Asian apprentices, according to the same research brief. Which trade someone enters, and which employer sponsors that apprenticeship, shapes both whether they finish and what finishing is worth.
The System Has Nearly Doubled In A Decade
The number of active registered apprentices in the United States grew from about 360,000 in 2015 to roughly 667,000 by 2024, according to data tracked on the Department of Labor's Apprentices by State Dashboard. Construction remains by far the largest sector, though the system has expanded into manufacturing, healthcare, IT and transportation in recent years. That growth has occurred almost entirely on the intake side. Getting more people to start a program has proven easier than getting a consistent majority of them to finish one.
Finishing Pays, By A Wide Margin
A Department of Labor evaluation of its American Apprenticeship Initiative, which funded 46 grantees between 2015 and 2021 to expand apprenticeship into new sectors, found that participating apprentices' earnings rose 49 percent on average after entering the program, compared with 16 percent growth over the same period for a matched group of comparable workers with the same sex, race, ethnicity, age, education level and state of residence, according to the Urban Institute's analysis of the evaluation. Separately, the Department of Labor has said 93 percent of people who complete a registered apprenticeship are employed afterward, with an average starting wage above $77,000 a year, according to a 2023 fact sheet from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
The Wage Ceiling Varies Sharply By Trade
Among occupations that typically require an apprenticeship, elevator and escalator installers and repairers had the highest mean wage in May 2023, at $48.11 an hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Boilermakers followed at $35.50, structural iron and steel workers at $32.80, plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters at $32.62, and electricians at $32.60, all above the $31.48 mean for all occupations nationally. At the other end, musical instrument repairers and tuners averaged $22.24 an hour, the only apprenticeship occupation BLS tracked with a mean wage below the $24.87 average for all jobs typically requiring only a high school diploma; terrazzo workers and finishers averaged $26.07, and stonemasons $27.37.
What The Combined Numbers Mean For Someone Choosing A Trade
A registered apprenticeship removes two of the biggest financial risks associated with a four-year degree: tuition debt and years of foregone income while studying full time. It does not remove the risk of not finishing, and the data show that risk is real and unevenly distributed by race and, less formally, by how well-resourced a given sponsor's program is. The trades with both strong completion track records among major sponsors and wage ceilings well above the national average, electrical work and plumbing among them, look meaningfully different as a bet than trades with lower pay ceilings or less institutional infrastructure behind them.
Industry groups that sponsor apprenticeships have also pushed back on reading completion rates alone as a verdict on program quality, particularly in construction, where workers sometimes leave a formal program because they've been hired directly into higher-paying work in the same trade rather than because the training failed them. That caveat matters for interpreting any single sponsor's numbers, but it does not change the national pattern: most people who start a registered apprenticeship do not finish it, and the ones who do finish see earnings gains that workers who never enter the system do not.
An apprenticeship's promise of paid, debt-free training holds regardless of trade. Its payoff doesn't.
