Journeyman Electrician Salary in Texas 2026,
$58,570 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Texas figure is $58,570 a year, or $28.16 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025 — 7.3% below the national median of $63,190, with no state income tax taken from it. That is the whole trade across every licence tier; the band runs $37,920 at the 10th percentile to $80,300 at the 90th, and experienced industrial journeymen sit toward the $71,130 seventy-fifth percentile.

Perform general electrical work of any kind — but not without supervision. The Texas journeyman licence authorises the work and requires that it be done under a master electrician's supervision, which in practice means a journeyman is employed by or contracted to a business whose electrical contractor's licence is held by a master. A journeyman cannot take a job directly from a customer or hold a contractor's licence. Moving past that ceiling means qualifying for the master licence, which requires journeyman experience and a further examination.

Beaumont-Port Arthur at $61,380, then Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos $60,390, Midland $59,530, Corpus Christi $59,410 and Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands $59,180. The whole table spans about two thousand dollars, so relocating within Texas is not the lever — what those top metros indicate is sector, since Beaumont-Port Arthur and Corpus Christi are refinery towns and Midland is the Permian Basin.

Consistently, and the metro table is the evidence: the Gulf coast petrochemical corridor and the Permian Basin lead a state whose largest residential construction markets do not. Industrial work carries higher skill requirements — instrumentation, controls, motor and high-voltage systems, hazardous-area classification — and it comes with turnaround and shutdown overtime that lifts annual earnings substantially. Because Texas taxes none of that overtime at state level, the effective gap between residential and industrial work here is wider than the published medians alone show.

No. SOC 47-2111 covers Electricians as one occupation, so registered apprentices near the $37,920 tenth percentile, residential wiremen, journeymen and master electricians are all in the same estimate. The $58,570 median falls within the journeyman range but describes the trade rather than the tier. Use the $46,670 quarter-point as roughly where a newly licensed journeyman starts and the $71,130 seventy-fifth percentile as where experienced industrial journeymen and leads sit.

Because it determines who can capture the margin on a job. A journeyman in Texas can do the work but cannot sell it: contracting requires an electrical contractor's licence, which requires a master electrician as its licence holder. So a journeyman's earnings are wages, negotiated against what a contractor can pay, while a master's can include the business's profit. That is not a comment on skill — a very experienced journeyman may be the best electrician on a site — it is a comment on legal structure. It is also why the realistic route past the $71,130 seventy-fifth percentile in this trade runs through the master examination rather than through more years on the tools.

The occupation pools every Texas licence tier, and the state's metro rows are compressed to the point of being uninformative about location while being quite informative about sector. The estimate also reports annual wages in a trade where hours vary enormously — a journeyman on a refinery turnaround schedule and one on a residential crew can hold the same licence and skill and report very different annual figures purely because of overtime. And employees on payrolls are what OEWS counts, so contract and per-diem arrangements common in turnaround work are captured unevenly.

Sector first — industrial, petrochemical, data centre and utility work pays above residential, and it is what the Beaumont-Port Arthur, Midland and Corpus Christi figures are showing. Technical specialisation second: instrumentation and controls, motor control, high-voltage and hazardous-area work are the scarce competencies in Texas industrial electrical. Turnaround availability third, since willingness to travel for scheduled shutdowns is what converts a base wage into the $71,130 range, untaxed by the state. And the master licence fourth, which is the only route past the ceiling the supervision requirement creates.