The pay data for traveling trades that no survey collects.
Advertised wages and per diem, by trade and state, refreshed weekly from 68 employer sources. Federal wage surveys lag a year or more, stop at the metro level, and never record per diem at all — which for a traveling workforce is the number that decides whether a job is worth taking.
Numbers you can put in a bid.
Advertised wage
Median, range and sample size per trade, nationally and by state where the sample supports it. Labelled advertised, never “paid” — that is a survey's word and we are not a survey.
Per diem — the part nobody else has
Prevalence (what share of postings offer it) shown beside median $/day. Dollar figures are computed over offering postings only; a job with no per diem is never averaged in as a zero.
Demand
Active and newly posted counts per trade and state, weekly. Where the work is going, not just what it pays.
Exactly what is in the data today.
Published straight from the index, not a sales sheet. A trade appears here only if it clears 30+ waged postings from 8+ separate employers. That second test is the one that matters: a rate drawn from three or four companies is those companies' pay policy, not a market.
| Trade | Waged postings | States | Sources | Per-diem reads |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Driver | 4430 | 51 | 34 | 119 |
| Electrician | 1487 | 50 | 47 | 276 |
| Welder | 1294 | 49 | 44 | 213 |
| Skilled Laborer | 1055 | 50 | 41 | 29 |
| Industrial Mechanic | 1005 | 46 | 45 | 12 |
| Machinist | 765 | 41 | 24 | 56 |
| HVAC Tech | 563 | 48 | 29 | 27 |
| Carpenter | 437 | 49 | 31 | 28 |
| QA/QC Inspector | 253 | 42 | 21 | 2 |
| Pipefitter | 237 | 45 | 39 | 106 |
| Equipment Operator | 207 | 45 | 29 | 25 |
| Plumber | 194 | 41 | 19 | 36 |
| Painter | 180 | 36 | 24 | 2 |
| Concrete Finisher | 172 | 40 | 20 | 11 |
| Millwright | 145 | 41 | 32 | 63 |
| Sheet Metal Mechanic | 137 | 32 | 16 | 31 |
| Crane Operator | 66 | 30 | 22 | 42 |
| Ironworker | 65 | 28 | 22 | 37 |
| Shipfitter | 50 | 17 | 8 | 34 |
| Instrument Tech | 39 | 27 | 23 | 7 |
| Solar Tech | 38 | 16 | 8 | 7 |
| Insulator | 36 | 22 | 15 | 5 |
Per-diem figures are published for 15 trades — Driver, Electrician, Welder, Skilled Laborer, Machinist, HVAC Tech, Carpenter, Pipefitter, Equipment Operator, Plumber, Millwright, Sheet Metal Mechanic, Crane Operator, Ironworker, Shipfitter. The rest carry per-diem reads but not yet enough to publish a median, and we say so rather than printing a thin number.
Priced on what you do with it, not how often you ask.
Call limits exist to stop abuse, not to meter value — the dataset is small enough to pull in one sweep, so charging by request would only reward whoever caches hardest. What changes the price is scope and rights.
API only
$599/mo
The data, without the platform. For teams feeding their own systems.
- National + state wage medians
- Per diem prevalence and median
- Weekly refresh
- Internal use
Enterprise
$899/mo
The whole platform with API access included.
- Everything in API only
- Plus the platform
- Job board and applicant flow
- Talent search
- Market Intelligence reports
- Analytics and placement ROI
Embed
$2,500/mo
Show RoadWage numbers to your customers, inside your product.
- Everything in API only
- Client-facing display rights
- Attribution and co-branding
- Higher rate limits
Redistribution
Custom
Republishing, resale, or bulk historical extracts.
- Negotiated scope and term
- Annual agreement
- Bulk and historical access
Annual billing is two months free, the same as every other RoadTrades plan.
We publish the sample size next to the number.
Every figure is drawn from public employer postings, parsed and normalised to an hourly basis. Cells too thin to be honest render as — rather than a precise-looking guess. Per diem is counted per day away from home, which is why it is reported separately from the wage and never blended into it. The coverage table above is generated from the live index each hour, so what you see is what you would receive.