Tools

Calculators

Interactive tools that run on the same official data as the rest of the site.

What each one answers

The three questions people actually ask before committing years to a trade are whether the training pays for itself, what the paperwork costs, and whether a different trade pays better for the same effort. Each calculator answers one of them, and each shows its working: the numbers come from the same federal datasets and state board schedules the rest of the site is built on, and each names the dataset it runs on.

The apprenticeship comparison runs a five-year model on your state's wages and the average net price of trade-school programs in that field, because the honest version of "is school worth it" has to count the year of earnings you give up, not just tuition. The license cost estimator adds up what a board publishes and, just as importantly, marks what it does not: several states price required items only inside an application portal, and an estimate that quietly filled those gaps would be a guess wearing a number. The salary comparison puts trades against each other in one state, which is the comparison the federal wage tables are structured to prevent — they publish one occupation at a time.

What they are not

None of these is a quote or an eligibility check. Wages are what people in the occupation earned across a whole state, not an offer; fees change between board updates; and no calculator here can tell you whether your own hours or schooling will satisfy a board. Each calculator names the authority behind its numbers, and the state pages linked from this site carry the board page for every figure. Where a licensing figure is missing the tool says so rather than substituting an average, which is why some rows read "not published" instead of showing a tidy number. The one exception is deliberate and labelled: where the College Scorecard reports no trade-school cost for a state, the ROI calculator uses a stated $15,000 estimate and says on screen that it has, because a comparison with one side blank is not a comparison. Results resting on that estimate are excluded from the summary counts on that page.

Wage data: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025. Program costs: US Department of Education College Scorecard, June 2026. Fees and hour requirements: state licensing boards, each linked on the state page it came from.