What each home-service trade pays

What the work pays in each of 23 home-service trades — the May 2025 median hourly wage published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, joined to our sourced startup-cost index so you can weigh what a trade pays against what it costs to enter. Medians run from $17.07/hr (Residential Cleaning) to $35.91/hr (Home Inspection); on these figures the fastest trade to earn back its own entry cost is Plumbing, at about 15 weeks of median-wage work.

Click a column heading to sort. *Weeks = startup-cost high estimate ÷ (median hourly wage × a 40-hour week) — reference arithmetic to compare trades, not an income forecast.

Employee wages are the floor, not your price

These are employee wages — what companies pay people to do the work. A self-employed operator has to bill well above the median wage to come out even after self-employment tax, insurance, equipment, a truck, unpaid drive time and slow weeks. Two of the free calculators do that arithmetic with your own numbers: the contractor break-even calculator works out the billing rate that actually clears your costs, and the sub & labor rate card prices the labor you sell on. Use the wage column as the floor a customer could hire an employee-equipped company against — never as your rate.

How this table is built

Wage figures are the national percentile estimates from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program (May 2025 national file oesm25nat, retrieved 2026-08-29), matched to each trade’s SOC occupation code — printed in every row so you can check the mapping. Cost-to-enter ranges come from the same cited research dataset behind the startup-cost index (essential equipment + used vehicle + first-year liability insurance + launch marketing). The join and the weeks-to-cover arithmetic are computed programmatically when this page is regenerated; nothing is hand-typed. Last regenerated 2026-08-29.

The 17 trades this page cannot map honestly

BLS publishes wages by occupation code, and 17 of our 40 trades have no dedicated code — pressure washing, junk removal and chimney sweeping, for example, have no occupation of their own in the May 2025 tables. Rather than force a misleading match, they are listed here with the reason:

• air duct dryer vent — no dedicated SOC occupation (grouped under Building Cleaning Workers, All Other).
• basement waterproofing — no dedicated SOC occupation.
• cabinet refinishing — nearest SOC code (Cabinetmakers) covers manufacturing, not refinishing.
• carpet cleaning — no dedicated SOC occupation (grouped under Building Cleaning Workers, All Other).
• chimney sweep — no dedicated SOC occupation.
• flooring — BLS splits flooring across three narrow codes (carpet, floor layers, sanders), none covering common wood/LVP work.
• gutters — no dedicated SOC occupation.
• irrigation — no dedicated SOC occupation.
• junk removal — nearest SOC code (Refuse Collectors) measures municipal collection, not junk hauling.
• kitchen bath remodel — remodeling spans several SOC trades; no single honest mapping.
• pool service — no dedicated SOC occupation.
• pressure washing — no dedicated SOC occupation.
• siding — no dedicated SOC occupation (siding work is spread across Carpenters and helpers).
• smoke mold remediation — no dedicated SOC occupation.
• standby generators — no dedicated SOC occupation (spans Electricians and HVAC).
• water treatment — no dedicated SOC occupation (spans Plumbers and installers).
• window cleaning — no dedicated SOC occupation (grouped under Building Cleaning Workers, All Other).

Use the numbers

Weigh pay against entry cost on the 40-trade startup-cost index, work through the starting-out questions, or go straight to a trade’s full plan on the Business Plans shelf — $14.99 each with a free companion kit, in English and Spanish.