Methodology and Sources | Military to Trades

Wages: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics

Pay figures come from the BLS OEWS May 2025 national and state data files, which we download directly and process without adjustment^[1]^[2]. For each trade we report the 10th, 25th, median, 75th and 90th percentile annual wages, hourly equivalents, the mean, and employment.

OEWS covers wage-and-salary workers. It excludes the self-employed, which matters most in trades like carpentry and plumbing.
State rankings exclude Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands. "Most concentrated" lists use the location quotient and include only states with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, so small samples don't dominate.
BLS suppresses some state estimates. Where a value is missing, we show a dash rather than estimate it.
Derived figures (the 10th-to-90th spread, the 90/10 ratio, top-state shares) are simple arithmetic on the published values.

Projections and training routes: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook

Employment growth and openings for 2025–35, typical entry education and training descriptions come from each trade's Occupational Outlook Handbook profile, linked on every career page^[3]. OOH profiles sometimes cover a broader group than the wage occupation; where they do, the career page says so.

On October 30, 2026, the BLS website refused our automated requests for the ironworker and masonry OOH pages. For those two trades, the figures in our comparison table were read from search-engine copies of the same BLS pages and are marked for recheck. All other OOH pages were fetched directly.

Military jobs: the O*NET crosswalk

The "military occupations that map over" lists come from O*NET's Military Crosswalk, which links military occupation codes from every branch to civilian occupations. It is built from the Defense Manpower Data Center's crosswalk plus O*NET's own supplements^[4]^[5].

We show military job titles rather than codes, because codes are reused and renumbered across branches and over time.
Each career page features a selection of enlisted titles and reports how many distinct titles the crosswalk links to the occupation in total.
A match means O*NET found related duties. It does not guarantee advanced placement in an apprenticeship or credit toward a licence; that is up to each program and state.

To check your own code, search it in O*NET's crosswalk and look at which civilian occupations it returns^[4]. If your job isn't linked to a trade, that doesn't rule you out; it means you'll more likely start without advanced standing.

GI Bill, SkillBridge and apprenticeship rules

Benefit rules and payment rates come from VA's pages on on-the-job training and Post-9/11 GI Bill rates^[6]^[7]. SkillBridge eligibility and approval rules come from the program's own overview and FAQ^[8]^[9]. Apprenticeship information comes from the Department of Labor's Apprenticeship.gov^[10]. We do not publish estimated dollar amounts for the GI Bill housing payment, because it depends on your training ZIP code and eligibility tier.

Counts of GI Bill-approved programs on some career pages were compiled from VA's public GI Bill Comparison Tool data on October 29, 2026, by Veteran Trade Schools, an affiliated site (see below)^[11]. Approval status changes, so always confirm a specific program in the tool.

Review dates

Every article shows two dates. "Last updated" is when the text last changed. "Sources reviewed" is when we last checked the figures against the live source pages. We plan to refresh wage data when BLS publishes each new OEWS release and to recheck VA rates when they change each August.

About Military to Trades

Military to Trades is written by the Military to Trades team. It is independent and is not affiliated with the VA, the Department of War, the Department of Labor or any branch of service.

Ownership disclosure. Military to Trades shares ownership with Veteran Trade Schools and Registered Trade Schools, which publish directories of GI Bill-approved and registered training programs. Where we link to those sites, we say so. Military to Trades does not currently accept paid placements or advertising; if that changes, sponsored content will be clearly labelled and kept separate from editorial pages.

Editorial standards. We report what the sources say and link them. We do not invent figures, do not claim hands-on experience we don't have, and do not rank individual employers or schools. Corrections and questions: [email protected].