Virginia Skilled Trades Outlook

What this evidence establishes

Virginia’s occupational planning requires careful geography. The Washington metropolitan area spans four jurisdictions, while the Hampton Roads wage geography crosses into North Carolina. This brief pairs six statewide occupational projections with wage evidence and keeps those regional boundaries explicit, so Northern Virginia is not treated as interchangeable with the entire Washington metro.

The published occupational outlook

The electrician projection moves from 25,480 jobs in the 2024 base year to 27,820 in 2034, with 9% growth as rounded by the source. It reports 2,560 average annual openings. The difference between the displayed endpoints is 2,340 jobs over the decade, or 234 per year when divided evenly for comparison. This annualized net change is a WIL calculation, not the source’s annual-openings measure and not a forecast of each individual year.

The larger openings figure includes growth and replacement. It must not be multiplied into an estimate of distinct available workers or read as a count of currently advertised vacancies. Projections are conditional planning estimates; actual employment can diverge from them. The base-year employment below belongs to the projections series, not a newly measured 2026 workforce count.

Wage distributions, not offer recommendations

The median divides the reported wage distribution in half. The 10th and 90th percentiles describe its spread; they are not validated entry-level and experienced-worker pay grades. All wages below are nominal annual dollars for May 2025. They cover the occupation across covered industries, rather than only construction contractors. Benefits and overtime are not included.

Read wages and projections as complementary series with different reference periods and coverage. Do not divide a projected employment change by a wage statistic or infer that a wage difference measures scarcity. This brief does not claim that a displayed difference is statistically significant.

Why geography changes the comparison

The statewide electrician median is $62,900. Selected regional medians are Richmond, VA: $61,350; Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk, VA-NC: $62,350; Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV: $75,930. Washington, DC–VA–MD–WV is not a Northern Virginia-only estimate. Virginia Beach–Chesapeake–Norfolk, VA–NC, Kingsport–Bristol, TN–VA and Winchester, VA–WV also cross state borders. These are nominal wage distributions, not job-offer quotes or evidence of available workers. No significance test or causal explanation of these differences is asserted.

Implications for workforce decisions

Among these six selected occupations, the largest published annual-opening totals are electricians (2,560), carpenters (2,280), heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration mechanics and installers (1,410). This ranking is confined to the selected occupations and is not a ranking of the entire state labor market.

A Northern Virginia study needs a defined county or service-area boundary and evidence matched to that boundary. The Washington metro wage estimate cannot substitute for a Virginia-only wage or worker count. Richmond, Hampton Roads and smaller labor markets should have separate recruitment assumptions. Validate any project-specific electrical or mechanical requirement against schedules and credentials; statewide projections do not allocate workers to data centers, shipbuilding or other individual industries.

What is still needed to size a training pipeline

Annual occupational openings are not an apprenticeship intake target. They can be filled through several pathways, including experienced workers and people moving between occupations. A program-level assessment needs actual entrants, active participants, completions, time to completion and employment outcomes, with the same occupation and geography definitions. This brief contains no verified state apprenticeship capacity or completion estimate. It does not establish a training shortfall or evaluate any named provider.

Use a local evidence request with these fields: occupation and credentials; service area; employer demand and reference date; program entrants and completions by cohort; placement and retention outcomes; and data coverage or missingness. Keep persons, jobs, training places and projected openings in separate columns. The next analytical step is to reconcile those measures, not to subtract training enrollment from the openings totals.

Methods and reproducibility

WIL extracted six preselected detailed occupations from the public O*NET OnLine state wage and employment-trend pages on 25 September 2026. The selection spans electrical, carpentry, plumbing, HVAC, welding and power-line work. It is a purposive comparison, not an exhaustive inventory or a ranking of all trades. The .00 O*NET codes used here map to the displayed detailed SOC codes. No parent occupation totals are added to their components.

The wage pages attribute their observations to BLS 2025 wage data; the trend pages identify Projections Central’s 2024–2034 state projections. WIL retained source HTML, exact URLs, SHA-256 hashes, displayed labels, raw cell strings and a reproducible extraction script. Annual wage percentiles are taken from the table headings, even where surrounding source prose uses the informal term “average.” No AlphaHire dataset, model, index or forecast enters these results.

The displayed statewide projections retain their own base employment and published rounded growth. The one derived comparison is (2034 projected employment − 2024 base employment) ÷ 10. It is not a separately estimated replacement rate. National and regional wage references are kept as distinct geographies; no overlapping areas or occupations are pooled.

Coverage and limitations

OEWS measures wage-and-salary jobs across covered industries and ownership categories; it excludes self-employed workers and certain other categories. A worker count for one employer or construction industry cannot be inferred from these all-industry occupational wages. The estimates combine survey panels and modeling, so May 2025 is the reference period rather than a census taken on one day. Annual wage figures are not guaranteed realized earnings.

The projections series and wage series have different purposes and reference periods. The public O*NET extract does not provide the sampling-error detail needed to test the regional wage differences shown here. This report therefore describes the published estimates without asserting statistical significance or a causal explanation. Missing observations are retained as missing; displayed wage percentiles are not confidence intervals.

Neither source measures workers available to change jobs, qualifications for a specific contract, licensed-worker availability, employer vacancies, project schedules, or hiring success. No proprietary labor-demand model is used. Published projections do not guarantee job security, and these pages do not report completed Q3 2026 outcomes. Decisions requiring those measures need additional evidence.

@techreport{WILRB20263VATRADES,
  title       = {Virginia Skilled Trades Outlook: Published employment projections, wage distributions and regional planning implications.},
  institution = {Workforce Intelligence Lab},
  type        = {Research Brief},
  number      = {WIL-RB-2026.3-VA-TRADES},
  year        = {2026},
  note        = {Version 1.0; methodology Public-source occupational comparison v1.0},
  url         = {https://wilinstitute.org/library/p/virginia-skilled-trades-outlook},
}

TY  - RPRT
TI  - Virginia Skilled Trades Outlook: Published employment projections, wage distributions and regional planning implications.
PY  - 2026
PB  - Workforce Intelligence Lab
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ET  - Version 1.0
UR  - https://wilinstitute.org/library/p/virginia-skilled-trades-outlook
AB  - Virginia’s occupational planning requires careful geography. The Washington metropolitan area spans four jurisdictions, while the Hampton Roads wage geography crosses into North Carolina. This brief pairs six statewide occupational projections with wage evidence and keeps those regional boundaries explicit, so Northern Virginia is not treated as interchangeable with the entire Washington metro.
ER  -