Electrician Salary in Colorado 2026,
$62,230 Median | BLS Data by City

Colorado electricians earn a median $62,230 a year, $29.92 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with the middle half between $48,880 and $78,470 and a full range of $45,520 to $94,160. That is 1.5% below the $63,190 national median, though the upper half of the band is considerably stronger than the midpoint suggests.

Through the Colorado State Electrical Board at the Division of Professions and Occupations. Colorado licenses at residential wireman, journeyman and master level on documented apprenticeship hours and a trade examination, and the licence is statewide rather than municipal. The master licence carries the authority to hold an electrical contractor registration, which is what permits contracting in your own right.

Boulder at $64,120, then Greeley at $63,290, Denver-Aurora-Centennial at $63,150, Fort Collins-Loveland at $61,410 and Pueblo at $60,200 — a spread of under four thousand dollars. Geography does very little for this trade in Colorado; the sector you work in does almost everything.

Supply. A location quotient of 1.22 means Colorado employs about a fifth more electricians per worker than the country does, drawn in by a long Front Range construction boom, and the residential tract market that absorbs many of them is easy to enter and pays accordingly — the tenth and twenty-fifth percentiles sit barely three thousand dollars apart. Abundant supply against standardised residential demand holds the median at $62,230.

A flat 4.4% state income tax that applies to overtime at the same rate as base pay. Denver, Aurora, Greenwood Village, Glendale and Sheridan charge a small flat monthly occupational privilege tax based on where you work rather than where you live — a few dollars a month, relevant for a trade whose job sites move.

It is a narrower licence for a narrower job. Colorado's three-tier structure lets someone qualify to work on residential wiring without completing the full journeyman requirement, which lowers the barrier into the residential tract construction that has dominated Front Range building for two decades. That is efficient for the industry and it is part of why the bottom of the Colorado band is so crowded — $45,520 at the tenth percentile and $48,880 at the twenty-fifth. Moving up requires the full journeyman licence and, more importantly, moving out of residential work.

It is a wage figure, not a compensation figure. Commercial and industrial work in Colorado runs scheduled overtime, and the state's renewable generation and transmission projects carry travel and per diem, so individual annual earnings in the upper half of the band often reflect hours rather than rate. On organised work, pension and health contributions add substantially to a package the survey never sees. And self-employed licensed contractors are largely outside the payroll survey.

Getting out of residential work, then the licence. The gap between the $48,880 twenty-fifth percentile and the $78,470 seventy-fifth is essentially the gap between residential tract wiring and commercial, institutional, data centre and industrial work. The full journeyman licence is the credential that opens it; the master licence and contractor registration open the top. Controls, instrumentation and medium-voltage competence carry premiums, as does the state's solar, wind and transmission work, and foreman responsibility adds another step.