Lineman Career Guide,
Salary, Licence & Jobs 2026

Through a registered apprenticeship, not a degree. The usual sequence is a high school diploma, a Class A CDL, and either a few months of pre-apprentice line school or a groundman job with a utility or line contractor. From there you compete for a slot in a Department of Labor Registered Apprenticeship — most commonly an IBEW/NECA joint program or a utility's own — and log roughly 7,000 paid on-the-job hours plus classroom work over about three and a half to four years before topping out as a journeyman.

The OEWS May 2025 median for Electrical Power-Line Installers and Repairers (SOC 49-9051) is $95,320 a year, or $45.83 an hour, with the range running from $51,470 at the 10th percentile — groundmen and first-year apprentices — to $128,690 at the 90th. Those figures are straight-time; the trade's real earnings often sit well above them because storm restoration, mutual-aid travel and outage windows generate heavy overtime that base wage tables do not capture.

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No. Electricians (SOC 47-2111) work inside the meter — branch circuits, panels and building systems governed by the National Electrical Code, licensed by state or municipal boards. Linemen work outside it, on the utility distribution and transmission system, under the National Electrical Safety Code and OSHA 1910.269 rather than the NEC, and generally without a state journeyman license. The apprenticeships are separate from day one, and crossing over means starting a new one.

About three and a half to four years for most programs, structured around roughly 7,000 hours of on-the-job training plus several hundred hours of related classroom instruction in AC theory, grounding, rigging and safe work practices. Apprentices are paid a stepped percentage of the journeyman rate that rises with each completed step, so the training is earned, not bought — there is no tuition and no student debt attached to it.

It is one of the more hazardous trades, and the industry's entire training structure reflects that. The work combines energized conductors, heights, heavy rigging and roadside traffic, often at night and in weather. The controls are real and enforced: minimum approach distances, personal protective grounds, insulated rubber gloves and sleeves on a test schedule, cover-up, tailboard briefings and pole-top rescue drills. Crews that treat those as paperwork are the ones that get hurt.

In practice yes. Bucket trucks, digger derricks, pole trailers and reel trailers are commercial vehicles, and nearly every utility and line contractor expects a Class A commercial driver's license either before hire or within the first stretch of the apprenticeship. Many pre-apprentice line schools build CDL training into the program for exactly that reason, since an applicant who already holds the license is materially easier to place.