Three different numbers show up when you search what electricians charge, and they answer three different questions. One is a wage. One is a billing rate. One is a British day rate wearing an American dollar sign.
The published ranges are easy to find. They are also the least useful part of the page, because every one of them is the output of a formula, and that formula has a denominator almost nobody checks.
Get the denominator wrong and a $90 hourly rate loses money on every hour you bill.
The wage is not the rate
A wage is what an electrician is paid. A rate is what the shop bills. A guide that puts $30 an hour and $150 an hour on the same page without saying which is which is comparing an employee’s pay to a company’s selling price.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a median annual wage of $63,190 for electricians in May 2025. The median hourly wage was $30.38. Those two line up exactly: $30.38 multiplied by 2,080 hours is $63,190.40, so BLS is working from a 2,080-hour year. Hold onto that, it matters shortly.
The lowest 10 percent earned less than $42,640 and the highest 10 percent earned more than $108,510. BLS counted 821,000 electrician jobs in 2025 and projects 9 percent growth from 2025 through 2035, which it labels much faster than average.
None of that tells you what to charge. It tells you what an electrician is paid. Your selling rate still has to carry overhead, unbilled time, and profit on top of that wage. Building that number from your own operation instead of a wage table is the whole exercise in pricing electrical jobs without underbidding yourself.
What the guides actually publish
Housecall Pro’s 2026 electrician pricing guide puts hourly ranges on the page:
- Apprentice: $40 to $60
- Journeyman: $60 to $90
- Master: $90 to $100
The guide notes these vary by region and business overhead. Worth remembering who publishes it: this is the company selling the software to run your shop, and what those plans actually cost a small electrical shop is a separate question from whether its rate ranges fit you.
The same guide lists a service call or call-out fee of $100 to $200, covering travel, dispatch, setup, and assessment time. For routine residential work it lists flat rates of $150 to $600 for outlets, switches, ceiling fans, basic breaker work, and simple fixture installs. For emergency or after-hours work it lists a $100 to $200 surcharge for nights, weekends, holidays, or same-day service, or an hourly rate multiplied by 1.5 for evenings and 2 for holidays.
Those are published prices. They are not evidence that a $90 journeyman rate covers your costs.
The formula, and the denominator nobody checks
Housecall Pro publishes the formula too:
Hourly overhead cost = Total annual overhead / Billable hours
Its worked example divides $120,000 in annual overhead by 4,000 billable hours and gets $30 per billable hour.
Look at the denominator. Two technicians at 2,080 paid hours each give you 4,160 paid hours in a year. The example bills 4,000 of them. That is 96 percent of every paid hour, which leaves no room for unbilled drive time, quoting, supply house runs, phone time, or callbacks.
Those hours are not abstract. They are the supply house run between jobs, the quote you write before anyone has approved anything, the drive across town. The phone is the invisible one, because a call you take standing on a ladder costs you the billable minute and can cost you the job on top of it. That is the shape of what a missed call really costs a California electrician. Meanwhile the wage keeps getting paid for every one of those hours.
Run the same published example at 60 percent of paid hours actually billable:
- 4,160 paid hours times 0.60 is 2,496 billable hours
- $120,000 divided by 2,496 is $48.08 of overhead per billable hour, not $30
- $30.38 divided by 0.60 is $50.63 of labor per billable hour, because you pay the wage for the unbilled hours too
- Cost per billable hour is $98.71
- Apply their own 20 percent margin formula and $98.71 divided by 0.80 is $123.39
The rate you need is $123.39. That sits above the entire published journeyman range of $60 to $90, and above the published master range of $90 to $100. At 60 percent utilization, billing $90 an hour loses money on every hour worked.
This is arithmetic on one vendor’s example, not a claim about your shop. Swap in your overhead and your own honest utilization and run it again.
Ten points of utilization is worth $17.63 an hour
Same numbers at 70 percent:
- 4,160 paid hours times 0.70 is 2,912 billable hours
- $120,000 divided by 2,912 is $41.21 of overhead per billable hour
- $30.38 divided by 0.70 is $43.40 of labor per billable hour
- Cost per billable hour is $84.61
- With the same 20 percent margin, $84.61 divided by 0.80 is $105.76
Moving from 60 to 70 percent utilization drops the rate you need by $17.63 an hour, about 14 percent, without touching your sticker price, your overhead, or anyone’s wage. Ten points of denominator beats a rate increase you may not be able to sell.
That is the part Wirewoman works on. She answers in about two seconds, 24/7, including nights, weekends, and holidays, and within 30 seconds of hang-up she texts you the whole job: the caller’s name, the address, the problem in the caller’s own words, how urgent it is, and the time she booked. Every call lands on a dashboard, and she books to your calendar rather than leaving you a message to decode later.
She also escalates real emergencies by your rules, not hers. You tell her which words mean call me now and who to ring after hours, which is the same policy question behind what counts as an electrical emergency. She does not raise your rate. She protects billable time: a call answered while you are on a ladder is an hour you did not have to interrupt, and a job that did not go to whoever picked up second. Flat monthly fee, no per-minute billing, and you keep your existing number.
A US day rate is usually a discount request
The day-rate figures that dominate search are British. UK sources quote roughly 250 to 350 pounds a day for domestic work, 300 to 500 pounds for commercial, and an average near 400 pounds on an 8-hour day, all referencing JIB rates from the UK industry body.
There is no comparable published, standardized US day rate for electricians. American guides publish hourly and flat rates instead.
So when a US customer asks for your day rate, they are usually asking for a discount for booking the full day, not quoting a benchmark. Price it as your billable-hour cost times the hours, then decide separately what a guaranteed full day is worth to you. Eight hours at your hourly rate minus a discount gives away the exact utilization gain that made the full day valuable. If the caller is reading a directory number back at you instead, that is its own conversation, and handling price-shopper calls is where it gets won or lost.
The call-out fee, and what California lets you collect
The $100 to $200 call-out fee exists to cover travel, dispatch, setup, and assessment time. It is the one line on the whole price sheet that attacks the denominator problem head on.
California also limits how you collect the rest. The Contractors State License Board requires a written contract for every home improvement project over $500. The down payment cannot be more than $1,000 or 10 percent of the contract price, whichever is less. Payments to the contractor cannot exceed the value of the work performed, with the down payment as the only exception.
A UK-style day rate with real money up front does not survive that deposit cap. Your cash flow has to come from work actually performed, which puts the weight back onto the call-out fee and an hourly number that is genuinely correct. The after-hours multipliers belong inside a written policy for the same reason, which is what the after-hours call policy every electrical shop needs lays out.
Run your own numerator and your own honest denominator. Your annual overhead, your paid wage, and the billable hours your shop actually produces. The rate falls out of those two numbers. It is not something you copy off a directory page.
