Prospective students ask us a version of the same question every week. What is the highest-paying trade in Ontario? We get the impulse. People want to know where the money is. University students ask their guidance counselors the exact same thing about majors.
The honest answer is that you’re asking the wrong question. The trade matters less than what you do once you’re in it.
The four sectors, roughly ranked
Trades in Ontario fall into four buckets: construction, industrial and manufacturing, transportation, and service.
Service trades pay the least on average. Hairstyling, cooking, network cabling, the rather esoteric horse harness maker: annual earnings often sit in the $40,000 to $60,000 range even after years on the job.
Construction is a different conversation. Plumbers, electricians and HVAC techs are clearing six figures while they’re still apprentices, or shortly after they get their journeyperson ticket. Same story for heavy equipment techs, truck and coach mechanics, millwrights and welders. Within a few years of qualifying, $100,000+ is normal.
Google “highest-paying trade in Ontario 2024” and you’ll get a different answer on every site. Some say electricians at around $90,000. Indeed and the other big boards put millwrights, truck drivers or HVAC techs on top depending on the week.
So which one is right? That’s the wrong question.
The dollar-an-hour rabbit hole
You could burn a weekend trying to figure out which job board has the cleanest data, the largest sample, the best methodology. It’s a waste of time. They all pull from their own banks. None is meaningfully better than the others. They get different numbers because they use different data.
More to the point, the numbers aren’t meaningfully different from each other. Most sites peg electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, truck and coach mechanics and millwrights between $48 and $51 an hour across the province.
Picking a trade based on a two-dollar difference in some internet average is one of the worst decisions you can make.
Finishing the apprenticeship beats the higher rate
Two reasons to be cautious about chasing the average wage.
First, that $48 to $51 only exists for licensed journeypersons. If you don’t finish your apprenticeship, you’re stuck around $25 an hour for the rest of your career. So pick a trade where you have the best shot at actually finishing. Getting certified in a $48 trade beats washing out of a $51 trade every single time. It’s not close.
Second, how you work the trade matters more than the headline rate. There’s a critical shortage of licensed tradespeople in every one of these high-wage fields. Overtime is always available. On-call is always available. A few extra hours a week dwarfs a two-dollar bump in the hourly rate. You don’t have to grind forever, but if you want to earn, that’s one of the cleanest ways to do it.
Life after the tools
There’s more to this than the paycheque, even in 2024 when groceries and rent are doing what they’re doing.
I’m not telling you to follow your passion. That’s nonsense advice. I’m telling you to pick a trade that’s likely to hold your interest, because most people who go into the trades don’t spend a full career on the tools.
Plumbers, electricians, millwrights, welders: a lot of them hang up the bags eventually. They move into sales, estimating, project management, equipment supply, or they start their own shop. Sometimes it’s about money. Often it’s because they’re genuinely interested in the field and that interest gives them the confidence to try the next thing.
Open your own HVAC company or start running large electrical projects, and the hourly wage on Indeed stops applying to you. So why pick a trade today based on a number that probably won’t describe your life in five years?
The hourly rate on a job board describes a starting point, not a ceiling.
Where this leaves you
Starting out in a compulsory trade, the ones we support at Trade Smart, opens up more doors than most people realize. There are far fewer journeypersons in Ontario than university graduates, and thousands more open jobs waiting for them.
If you just want to make money, you can do that in any compulsory trade without obsessing over which one ranks first this quarter. If you want more than money, the trades have that too. The question isn’t which trade pays the most. It’s which trade you’ll finish, and what you’ll do with the ticket once you have it.
