How much should an electrician cost per hour?

The wage paid to an electrician is not the rate you are billed. The 2025 national median electrician wage is $30.38 an hour, with the middle half of workers between $23.76 and $40.36. Applying the common 2x to 3x burden and overhead multiplier used by small residential contractors, a defensible billed labor rate at the median lands between $61 and $91 an hour. A one-person shop with an old van may sit near the bottom; a firm with dispatchers, warranty reserve and permit staff sits near the top.

Is a $2,000 electrical quote for one day of work too high?

Work it out. One electrician at the $30.38 median for 8 hours is $243 in wages. At a 2.5x burden that is $607 billed labor. To reach $2,000 the quote needs roughly $1,393 of materials, permit fees, disposal and profit above burden. If the job is a panel swap with a permit and a new load center, that is plausible. If it is replacing six receptacles, it is not, and the itemization will show which.

Why are electrical quotes higher in 2026 than last year?

Two things moved. Electrical machinery and equipment prices at the producer level rose 13.2 percent over the twelve months to July 2026, from an index level of 141.641 to 160.394. Primary nonferrous metals, which drive copper wire, rose 52.8 percent, from 355.181 to 542.853. These are index points, not dollars, so they describe direction rather than a price. On a wire-heavy job, material lines should have moved sharply. On a labor-heavy job, far less.

What single question exposes a padded electrical bid?

Ask: how many labor hours are in this price, and at what billed rate. A contractor who has actually estimated the job answers immediately, because they built the number that way. A padded bid usually cannot answer without recalculating in front of you, or answers with a rate above $150 an hour for a single electrician, which implies a burden multiplier near 5x on the $30.38 median. That is far outside the usual 2x to 3x working range.

Should I expect a helper on the bill as well as the electrician?

Often yes, and it usually lowers the total. A two-person crew of one electrician at $30.38 and a lower-wage helper does more work per hour than one electrician alone. A supervisor at the $38.42 median first-line construction supervisor wage may also appear on larger jobs. Ask whether supervision is a separate line or already inside the billed hourly rate. Paying for it twice is a real and common error.

Is Your Electrical Quote Fair? Check It Against Wages

An electrical quote is fair if you can rebuild it from hours, wages and materials and land close to the number on the page. Using the 2025 national median electrician wage of $30.38 an hour and the usual 2x to 3x burden multiplier, one electrician for a full 8-hour day should carry roughly $486 to $729 in billed labor. Everything above that has to be named.

Key points

The 2025 median wage paid to electricians in the United States is $30.38 an hour, with the 25th percentile at $23.76 and the 75th at $40.36, across 757,220 employed workers.
That wage is not your price. Small residential contractors commonly bill 2x to 3x the wage to cover payroll taxes, insurance, vehicles, tools, office time, warranty and profit, giving a defensible billed rate of $61 to $91 an hour at the median.
Producer prices for electrical machinery and equipment rose 13.2 percent in the twelve months to July 2026; primary nonferrous metals, the copper input, rose 52.8 percent.
A supervisor on site is paid a median $38.42 an hour, so a foreman-led crew raises the labor base by about 26 percent per supervised hour compared with a median electrician.
This page has never inspected a property, surveyed a contractor or collected a quote. Every figure below is either federal data or arithmetic performed on federal data in front of you.

Complex network of electrical wiring and control panels in an industrial setting.

Where do these wage numbers come from?

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program, 2025 survey year, occupation code 47-2111. The full series is at BLS OEWS, Electricians, United States, and the occupation profile including entry requirements and outlook is in the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook.

Electrical meter and fuse box on a white wall in Cape Town, South Africa, for energy monitoring or billing.

Measure	Hourly wage paid to worker	What it means for your quote
25th percentile	$23.76	A quarter of electricians are paid less than this. Common for newer licensed hands.
Median	$30.38	Half are paid more, half less. Use this as your default.
Mean	$34.37	Above the median, so the top of the distribution is pulling the average up.
75th percentile	$40.36	A quarter are paid more than this. Specialists, high-cost metros, heavy commercial.
First-line supervisor, median	$38.42	Foreman rate. Appears on larger jobs.
Employment	757,220	Size of the occupation nationally.

Read the table as a wage table, not a price list. Nobody bills you $30.38 an hour and stays in business.

Why is the billed rate two to three times the wage?

Because the wage is only the part the worker takes home. On top of it the contractor pays employer payroll taxes, workers’ compensation premiums (high for electrical trades), general liability insurance, the truck and its fuel and maintenance, tools and test equipment, the hours spent estimating your job and not billing anyone, a warranty reserve for callbacks, and finally profit.

Bright yellow high voltage warning sign on a locked electrical box.

The 2x to 3x range is a working assumption, not a measured federal figure. Nothing in the BLS data tells you what a contractor marks up. State it as an assumption and argue with it if your contractor’s structure is different. A licensed owner-operator with a paid-off van and no office staff genuinely sits lower. A firm that answers the phone at 9pm and pulls your permit sits higher.

Wage input	2.0x billed rate	2.5x billed rate	3.0x billed rate
$23.76 (25th pct)	$47.52	$59.40	$71.28
$30.38 (median)	$60.76	$75.95	$91.14
$34.37 (mean)	$68.74	$85.93	$103.11
$38.42 (supervisor)	$76.84	$96.05	$115.26
$40.36 (75th pct)	$80.72	$100.90	$121.08

The whole defensible band runs from $47.52 to $121.08 an hour for one person. If your quote implies a rate outside that, one of the two inputs is unusual and the contractor should be able to say which.

What should a job cost, hour by hour?

Here is the arithmetic, one line at a time, for a single electrician at the median wage and a 2.5x burden.

Crew: 1 electrician
Wage: $30.38 per hour (BLS 2025 median)
Burden and overhead multiplier: 2.5x (assumption, not measured)
Billed labor rate: $30.38 × 2.5 = $75.95 per hour
Hours: as listed below
Materials: shown separately, and treated as an allowance you should replace with your contractor’s actual list

Now sweep the whole realistic range of job sizes rather than showing one example.

Labor hours	Wage cost (hrs × $30.38)	Billed labor at 2.0x	Billed labor at 2.5x	Billed labor at 3.0x
1	$30.38	$60.76	$75.95	$91.14
2	$60.76	$121.52	$151.90	$182.28
3	$91.14	$182.28	$227.85	$273.42
4	$121.52	$243.04	$303.80	$364.56
6	$182.28	$364.56	$455.70	$546.84
8 (one day)	$243.04	$486.08	$607.60	$729.12
12	$364.56	$729.12	$911.40	$1,093.68
16 (two days)	$486.08	$972.16	$1,215.20	$1,458.24
24 (three days)	$729.12	$1,458.24	$1,822.80	$2,187.36
32 (four days)	$972.16	$1,944.32	$2,430.80	$2,916.48
40 (one week)	$1,215.20	$2,430.40	$3,038.00	$3,645.60
60	$1,822.80	$3,645.60	$4,557.00	$5,468.40
80 (two weeks)	$2,430.40	$4,860.80	$6,076.00	$7,291.20

Find the row that matches the hours your contractor named. That is the labor component of a fair quote. Materials, permits and disposal sit on top and must be listed separately.

If your contractor will not name a number of hours, you cannot use this table, and that refusal is itself the finding.

How much does the crew and wage tier change the answer?

Two axes move the labor number more than anything else: which wage tier the crew sits in, and how many people are on site. Here is a full day of 8 hours per person, at the 2.5x multiplier, with the total billed labor for the job.

Crew	Wage basis	Wage cost for 8 hrs each	Billed labor at 2.5x
1 electrician, 25th pct	$23.76	$190.08	$475.20
1 electrician, median	$30.38	$243.04	$607.60
1 electrician, 75th pct	$40.36	$322.88	$807.20
2 electricians, 25th pct	$23.76 × 2	$380.16	$950.40
2 electricians, median	$30.38 × 2	$486.08	$1,215.20
2 electricians, 75th pct	$40.36 × 2	$645.76	$1,614.40
1 supervisor + 1 electrician, median	$38.42 + $30.38	$550.40	$1,376.00
1 supervisor + 2 electricians, median	$38.42 + ($30.38 × 2)	$793.44	$1,983.60
3 electricians, median	$30.38 × 3	$729.12	$1,822.80

Two readings matter here. First, the spread between the cheapest and most expensive single-electrician day is $475.20 to $807.20, a difference of $332.00, or 70 percent, on identical hours. Wage tier alone can nearly double a day rate before anyone has argued about materials.

Second, adding a supervisor is not free. Swapping a median electrician for a supervisor on an 8-hour day raises wage cost from $243.04 to $307.36, up $64.32, because $38.42 is 26.5 percent above $30.38. On a five-day job that is $321.60 of extra wage, or $804.00 billed at 2.5x. Ask whether the supervisor is a working hand or a visitor.

How do metro areas differ, and how big is the spread?

Plainly: the data supplied for this article is national only, so this page cannot compare Dallas with Boston. Anyone showing you a metro-by-metro electrician wage table sourced from a cost-guide site is showing you something they did not measure either.

What the national distribution does tell you is the size of the spread you should expect once geography is in play. The gap between the 25th percentile at $23.76 and the 75th at $40.36 is $16.60 an hour, meaning the top of the middle band is 69.9 percent above the bottom. A large share of that spread is geographic. If you moved from a low-wage market to a high-wage one, a labor line that was $475.20 for a day becomes $807.20 for the same eight hours.

The practical use: if you are comparing a quote against a friend’s quote in another state, expect up to a 70 percent labor difference before either of you has been overcharged.

Have materials really gone up, or is that an excuse?

They have gone up, and the federal producer price data says by how much. These are index levels with 1982 set to 100. They are index points, not dollars, and cannot be converted into a price per foot of wire.

PPI series	July 2025	July 2026	12-month change
Electrical machinery and equipment (WPU117)	141.641	160.394	+13.2%
Primary nonferrous metals (WPU1022)	355.181	542.853	+52.8%

Source: BLS Producer Price Index, WPU117 and WPU1022.

Now reverse the calculation, because that is the question you actually have. If a contractor tells you the quote is up because of materials, how much of the total does that justify? Take a job with a $2,000 total a year ago. Labor is unchanged in this exercise; only the material share is re-priced at the equipment index rate of 13.2 percent.

Material share of last year’s $2,000 job	Material dollars	Material dollars after +13.2%	New total	Total increase
10%	$200	$226.40	$2,026.40	+1.3%
20%	$400	$452.80	$2,052.80	+2.6%
30%	$600	$679.20	$2,079.20	+4.0%
40%	$800	$905.60	$2,105.60	+5.3%
50%	$1,000	$1,132.00	$2,132.00	+6.6%
60%	$1,200	$1,358.40	$2,158.40	+7.9%
70%	$1,400	$1,584.80	$2,184.80	+9.2%

Read the last column. Even on a job that is 70 percent materials, equipment inflation alone justifies about 9 percent on the total. It does not justify 30 percent. If the increase is larger, either the copper-heavy nonferrous line applies (a rewire, service entrance conductors, long homeruns) or something other than materials moved.

A copper-heavy job is different. At +52.8 percent on primary nonferrous metals, a job that was half wire by value would see that half rise by more than a third of the original total. On a rewire, a big jump is consistent with the data. On a fixture swap, it is not.

Where is this estimate wrong?

In several predictable places, and you should assume at least one applies to you.

Permits. Not in any wage figure above. Permit fees are set by your jurisdiction and vary by scope. A panel replacement or service upgrade almost always requires one, and inspection time is real labor the contractor cannot skip.
Code upgrades triggered by the work. Opening a wall or replacing a panel can require AFCI or GFCI protection, grounding electrode corrections, or bonding work that was compliant when installed and is not now. This is not padding. It is the reason two quotes for “the same job” differ by hundreds.
Disposal. Old panels, conductors and fixtures leave the site. Some of that has scrap value and some has a fee.
Access and difficulty. Finished walls, plaster and lath, a crawlspace you cannot stand in, a two-story fishing route, a slab foundation. All multiply hours, and the hours table above does not know your house. This is the electrical equivalent of roof pitch.
Season and scheduling. Contractors busy in peak months quote higher because they can. The wage data does not move that fast; availability does.
Emergency call-out. No dead outlet at 11pm is billed at $75.95 an hour. Expect a call-out fee plus a premium rate. That is a different product from scheduled work.
The multiplier itself. 2.5x is an assumption stated openly. If your contractor operates at 2.0x or 3.2x, every row above shifts and none of the arithmetic is wrong, only the input.

Two things people get wrong about electrical quotes

Misconception one: “the electrician’s rate should be around $30 an hour, so $95 an hour is a ripoff.” The $30.38 figure is a wage paid to a worker, from the employer’s payroll, before the employer pays payroll tax, workers’ comp and liability insurance on top. The homeowner’s billed rate has to fund all of that plus the van, the tools and the unbilled hour spent writing your estimate. At a 3.0x multiplier the median wage produces $91.14 an hour, which is not a ripoff, it is arithmetic. The number that should alarm you is $150 or $200 an hour for a single non-emergency electrician, because that implies roughly 5x to 6.6x on the median wage.

Misconception two: “materials are up more than 50 percent, so my quote should be up 50 percent.” Only if your job is entirely copper. The +52.8 percent applies to primary nonferrous metals, an input, not to a finished quote. The broader electrical equipment index moved 13.2 percent. And labor, the majority of most residential electrical bills, is not in either index. The reverse table above shows that a 70-percent-materials job justifies around 9 percent on the total from equipment inflation. Blanket application of the metals figure to your whole invoice is not supported by the data.

How do you read a real quote against these numbers?

A quote you can check has these lines separated. A quote you cannot check has one number.

Insist on seeing, as distinct items:

Labor hours and the billed hourly rate, stated as two numbers rather than one lump.
Crew composition — how many people, and whether a supervisor is charged separately or already inside the rate.
Materials, as a dollar figure, ideally with the major components named. Panel, breakers, conductor, fixtures.
Permit and inspection fees, at cost or with a stated handling charge.
Disposal.
Anything conditional, written as a conditional. “If the service entrance requires replacement, add X.”

The single question that exposes a padded bid: how many labor hours are in this, and at what rate?

A contractor who estimated the job answers in under five seconds, because that is how they built the price. If the answer is a pause, a recalculation, or “we don’t break it out that way,” you are not looking at an estimate, you are looking at a number someone felt was about right. Take that answer, find the row in the hours table above, and see whether the labor they named plus the materials they named reaches the total they wrote. If it does not, ask what closes the gap. There is often a legitimate answer, and it is usually permits or a code upgrade they forgot to mention.

What should you check before signing?

The quote names labor hours and a billed rate, and those two numbers multiply out to something on the hours table.
The implied hourly rate falls inside $47.52 to $121.08 for a single electrician, or you understand why it does not.
Materials are a separate line, not folded into labor.
Permit responsibility is written down: who pulls it, who pays it, whether it is in the total.
Conditional work is written as conditional, with a price, not left as “we’ll see what we find.”
The license and insurance are named on the document, not just mentioned. Workers’ compensation is a large part of why the multiplier is 2x to 3x, and a contractor who is not carrying it is cheaper for a reason you do not want to discover after an injury on your property.
You have at least two quotes broken out the same way. Comparing two lump sums tells you nothing; comparing two labor-hour figures tells you which contractor understands the job.

This site has not visited your house, spoken to your contractor or collected a single quote. It has done arithmetic on federal wage and price data and shown every step. Take the tables to your contractor and let them correct the inputs.