The highest paying trades in Australia

The short answer: what the trades pay

The official pay figures come from the Australian Government's occupation profiles on the Jobs and Skills Australia website. They report median weekly earnings for full-time non-managerial workers on an adult wage, built on the ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours. Treat them as a guide only. They are refreshed as new ABS data lands, they tend to sit below what experienced or self-employed tradies actually take home, and they say nothing about overtime, allowances or going out on your own. Pay always climbs with experience.

Exact dollar figures date quickly and shift each time the ABS data updates, so rather than lock in a number that is wrong within a year, here is where the eight trades on this site sit relative to each other. Most of them cluster in a fairly narrow band. For the current weekly dollar figure on any single trade, open its profile on the Jobs and Skills Australia site linked below and read it off the live page.

• •Near the top of the table: bricklaying, then electrical and plumbing close behind.
• •Through the middle: structural steel and welding trades, motor mechanics, and airconditioning and refrigeration mechanics.
• •Nearer the bottom: carpentry and painting, which usually sit at the lower end of the band.

Highest paid and best bet are not the same thing

Bricklaying tends to top the weekly pay table, but very few people would call it the smartest trade to pick right now. The work is brutal on your knees and back, a lot of it is piecework (you get paid by how much you lay, so a rained-out week is a lean week), and demand has been softening as building methods change. High pay with shrinking, weather-dependent work is a different proposition to high pay with a queue of work out the door.

Electrical and plumbing are the genuine all-rounders. They pay near the top, demand is strong and forecast to keep growing, and both are licensed trades. That licence is the important bit. You legally cannot do most electrical or plumbing work without one, which keeps the number of people competing for the work down and props your pay up. It is a moat around your income that a painter or a labourer does not have.

The honest rundown on the rest

The trades in the middle and lower half of the table each have their own trade-offs worth knowing before you commit:

• •HVAC and refrigeration: quieter public profile than sparkies and plumbers, but a growing field (cooling demand, data centres, tighter refrigerant rules). You need a refrigerant handling licence, and a fair bit of the work is diagnostics and service rather than new installs.
• •Automotive: often a passion trade, and the pay reflects that it is easier to get into. Wages lag the licensed building trades, and the shift to electric vehicles is reshaping the skills you will need over a career.
• •Welding and fabrication: middle of the table on average, but this trade has a long tail. Coded welders, pressure work, and rig or mining fabrication can earn very well. The conditions can be hot, loud and physically demanding.
• •Carpentry: broad, portable and always in demand, but the average pay sits at the lower end. Chippies who go out on their own and run jobs are where the real money in carpentry shows up.
• •Painting: the lowest of the group and the most casualised, partly because the barrier to entry is low. Steady work is very doable, but it rarely tops the pay tables.
• •Bricklaying: high weekly pay, hardest on the body, and the least certain outlook of the eight.

Where the real money actually comes from

The averages above are for someone working full-time as an employee. The tradies earning well above them almost always did one or more of these things:

• •Got licensed and went out on their own. A licensed electrician or plumber who runs their own business and employs others is in a different earning bracket to a wage employee. It also brings paperwork, chasing invoices, insurance and business risk, so it is not free money.
• •Chased overtime and allowances. A big slice of trade income on commercial and civil sites is penalty rates, overtime and site allowances, not the base rate.
• •Went to mining, resources or remote work. FIFO and remote jobs pay a premium, and it is real money. The cost is time away from home and a punishing roster.
• •Specialised. A special-class electrician, an instrumentation or high-voltage sparky, a coded or pressure welder, a gas or fire-services plumber: the narrower and more technical the skill, the more it pays.

The catch: apprentice pay starts low

The upside of a trade is that you earn while you learn and finish with no student debt. The downside is that first-year apprentice pay is genuinely low, and you need to plan for that.

Apprentice pay is not a single national number. It is set by the award that covers your trade, and it steps up each year of your apprenticeship as your skills grow. Your age matters too: an adult apprentice (someone who starts at 21 or older) is usually paid more than a junior. Some awards also lift your pay as you hit competency milestones.

Do not trust random salary figures online for apprentice pay. Put your exact trade, award, year and age into the Fair Work Ombudsman's Pay Calculator to see your actual minimum. It is the only figure that counts.

The trade-offs nobody puts on the poster

Pay is only half the picture. Every trade on this list asks something of you that a salary figure does not show:

• •Your body does the earning. Knees, backs, shoulders and hearing wear out, especially in bricklaying, welding and plumbing. Plenty of tradies move into supervising, estimating or their own business partly to get off the tools.
• •On-call and early starts. Plumbing and HVAC service work can mean callouts. Site work often means 6am starts and long days.
• •Weather and cash flow. Outdoor trades lose days to rain and heat, and piecework or self-employment means your income is not always steady.
• •Business risk. Going out on your own is where the top money is, but it comes with quoting, chasing payments, insurance and quiet patches.

How to actually choose

If you are chasing the best combination of pay, demand and job security, electrical and plumbing are the clearest picks, and the licence is a big part of why. If a specific trade genuinely interests you, that matters more than a hundred dollars a week on a table, because the tradies who earn the most are almost always the ones who stuck with it, got good, and eventually ran their own work.

Before you sign anything, look past the wage. Check demand and the outlook for your trade in your state, whether it is licensed, and what your first year of pay really looks like on the Fair Work calculator. A trade is a decade-long decision, not a starting salary.