RoadWage: Live Pay and Per Diem Data for the Traveling Trades

What does traveling trades work actually pay? Advertised wages and per diem, by trade and state, read weekly from live employer postings — that is RoadWage, the pay data engine behind RoadTrades. As of mid-August 2026 it holds 7,144 live pay reads across 16 trades at national grain, 50 states, and 45 employer sources. This post explains where those numbers come from, and the rules that keep them honest.

Why the official numbers miss the road

The federal wage survey — BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics — is the best baseline that exists, and RoadTrades uses it. But it has three gaps that matter to anyone who travels for work. It publishes a year or more behind the market. It stops at state and metro grain, when a traveler needs the number at the plant gate. And it never records per diem at all, because it measures wages — and per diem is not a wage.

The GSA per-diem tables publish the federal ceilings travelers and recruiters plan against, but a ceiling is not an offer. Nobody in the official data records what employers are actually putting on the table this week — and for a traveling workforce, per diem is routinely the number that decides whether a job is worth taking.

What RoadWage reads instead

RoadWage reads live employer postings — 45 separate sources as of this writing — refreshed weekly, normalized to the 29 trades on the platform, deduplicated, and retired when a posting goes stale. One example of what that produces: for electricians alone, the index currently holds 597 waged postings from 35 separate employer sources, including 113 postings with explicit per-diem terms, across all 50 states.

The honesty rules

Pay data is only worth citing if the methodology refuses to flatter it. Four rules are built in:

• Advertised, never “paid.” RoadWage reads what employers advertise. “Paid” is a survey’s word, and this is not a survey — the label never overclaims.
• Per diem is conditional-only. The per-diem median is computed over postings that offer it, with prevalence — the share of postings offering it — shown beside the dollar figure. A job with no per diem is never averaged in as a zero.
• The eight-employer gate. No figure publishes below 30 waged postings from at least 8 separate employers. A rate drawn from three companies is those companies’ pay policy, not a market.
• Wide bands don’t vote. An ad offering $21–$39 spans apprentice-to-journeyman in one range. It counts for demand, but its midpoint is nobody’s rate, so it is excluded from wage medians.

Per diem: the deciding number

For fiscal year 2026 the standard federal ceiling is $110 per night lodging plus $68 per day meals and incidentals — $178 per day across most U.S. counties. Trade-hub counties run higher: Phoenix at $315 per day, Savannah at $256, Pittsburgh at $218. Two jobs at the same hourly rate can differ by hundreds of dollars a week once per diem, schedule, and days-paid terms are counted — which is why every posting on RoadTrades carries its per-diem terms next to the rate, and why the free blended-rate calculator exists: it separates tax-free per diem from taxable wages so a traveler can see what an offer is actually worth before accepting it.

Where to see the data

The free, public surface is the Traveling Trades Pay & Per-Diem Index — statewide wage medians for the platform trades plus current GSA rates, refreshed monthly, no account required. Every listing on the job board carries pay and per-diem terms. Recruiters get RoadWage benchmarking inside the recruiter tools, and teams that want the raw feed can ask about the RoadWage Data API.

Journalists and researchers: the figures above are point-in-time reads from a moving index. If you are writing about pay in the skilled trades and need current numbers — or a cut of the data the public pages don’t show — ask. Citing RoadWage with a link is the only attribution we ask for.