About

Why this site exists

Deciding to enter a trade is a five-figure decision usually made with worse data than buying a used car. The government publishes plenty: wages by state and metro, job projections, training outcomes, licensing rules. It just sits scattered across agencies, formats, and fifty state websites.

SkilledWage puts it in one place. Salary figures built on BLS data. Licensing pages compiled from state boards, statute by statute. Trade-school costs, where they appear, from the Department of Education's own published programme numbers. Every figure carries a citation and a date, and the methodology explains how each number is computed.

Who publishes this site

This is an independent data project, published and maintained by the SkilledWage team. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated on behalf of any government agency, licensing board, trade school, union, or employer, and no school or lead-generation network pays for placement here.

Why trust a compilation instead of the state board itself?

You should not take our word for anything, and the site is built so you do not have to. Every licensing fact links to the state board page, statute or administrative rule it came from, and carries the date we last checked it. When those disagree with us, they win: the board has the final word and each page says so.

What a compilation adds is the part the boards do not do. A state publishes its own rules, scattered across application PDFs and per-license pages, and never tells you how its requirements compare to the state next door, what the whole path costs when you add the fees up, or which of the fifty states will recognize the credential you already hold. That is the work here, and it is checked rather than asserted: records whose sources were ambiguous were independently re-verified a second time before publication, and the ones that stayed unclear are marked rather than guessed. The methodology spells out the whole process, including what we refuse to publish.

Nobody on this team is a licensed tradesperson, and we do not publish invented author names or credentials we do not hold. That is precisely why the site reports what official sources say rather than offering advice.

How to reach us

For data corrections, accessibility problems, or anything else: the contact page. Corrections are published on the corrections page rather than quietly patched, including the ones we caught ourselves.

How this is funded

The site currently earns nothing. No advertising, no affiliate links, no lead forms, no sponsored placement. When that changes it will be through clearly marked mechanisms disclosed on the page where they appear, and it will not change what the data says. See the editorial policy and disclosure.