Electrician Salary in North Carolina 2026,
$56,800 Median | BLS Data by City

The published figure is $56,800 a year, or $27.31 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025 for SOC 47-2111, with a band from $40,130 at the 10th percentile to $75,060 at the 90th. That is 10.1% below the national median of $63,190. The middle half of North Carolina electricians earn between $47,070 and $61,920, which is a tighter interquartile spread than the trade shows nationally.

Durham-Chapel Hill, at $59,220, just ahead of Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia $59,080, Rocky Mount $58,710, Greensboro-High Point $58,380 and Fayetteville $57,690. The whole table fits inside $1,530, so metro choice is close to irrelevant to gross pay in this trade in North Carolina — Rocky Mount sitting third is the clearest evidence of that, since it is not a high-cost market.

Not as an individual. The North Carolina State Board of Examiners of Electrical Contractors licenses the contracting business, in Limited, Intermediate and Unlimited classifications, and an electrician may work an entire career under someone else's licence without sitting a state exam. The licence becomes necessary at the point of contracting for work directly, which is also roughly the point on the ladder where earnings pass the $61,920 seventy-fifth percentile.

State withholding is a flat 4.5%, reduced from 4.75% in 2024, with no city or county income tax anywhere in North Carolina. On the $56,800 median that is a straightforward state deduction before federal tax and FICA, and it does not change as an electrician climbs the band — the same flat rate applies at the $40,130 tenth percentile and the $75,060 ninetieth.

It is at the bottom of its regional peer group on gross pay. Texas pays $58,570, New Mexico $58,390, Georgia $58,320 and Florida $57,250, all above the North Carolina $56,800; only Alabama is lower at $55,690. The flat 4.5% tax closes part of that gap against Georgia, though not against Texas or Florida, which levy no state income tax on wages at all.

Because the mix of work is narrow. A location quotient of 0.90 on 21,640 jobs says North Carolina employs electricians at slightly below the national rate for the size of its workforce, and the composition skews residential and light commercial — the Charlotte and Triangle housing pipelines, retail and warehouse fit-out, and school and municipal work. States with wider bands usually have a heavy industrial or utility base paying a distinct premium at the top, or a strong union sector setting a scale floor. North Carolina has neither at scale, so the distribution compresses from both ends and the interquartile range lands at $47,070 to $61,920.

It is a wage-and-salary median and it excludes the self-employed. In a state that licenses contractors rather than workers, the electricians who cross into contracting stop appearing on this row entirely, and they are disproportionately the highest earners. The published $75,060 ninetieth percentile therefore describes the top of the employed population, not the top of the trade. The figure is also an annualisation of an hourly rate at $27.31 and assumes full-year employment, which residential new-construction work in this state does not always deliver.

Overtime is the main one and it is not in the median: BLS reports straight-time earnings, so a data-centre or plant-shutdown schedule running fifty or sixty hours is worth materially more than the annual figure implies. Beyond that, per diem on travelling industrial work, a shift differential on plant maintenance, prevailing-wage rates on federally funded projects under Davis-Bacon, and a service-call bonus structure on residential HVAC-adjacent electrical work. None of these are captured in a $56,800 median, and all of them are available in North Carolina without changing metro.