Frame houses, build forms, hang doors and trim. You can be paid from your first week and never owe a dollar in tuition.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Typical
$60,580
First year
$40,410
Union journeyman or foreman
$99,910
The national median is $60,580 a year, and the bottom tenth start near $40,410. Union commercial work in big metro areas sits at the top of that range and adds a pension on top. Residential framing in a low cost state sits near the bottom.
About half the journeyman rate
First period apprentice, with a raise roughly every six months
Registered apprenticeships set your wage as a percentage of the fully qualified rate. You start around half and climb toward the full rate by the end. No tuition, no debt.
$99,910 and up
Top tenth: union journeymen, lead carpenters, foremen, superintendents
Overtime is where a lot of carpenters actually clear six figures. Running your own small remodeling business pays more again, with all the risk of a small business.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
A registered apprenticeship costs no tuition and pays you a wage from the first week, so the low end is a starter set of hand tools and bags plus boots and a hard hat. The high end is a one year community college carpentry certificate paid up front, a fuller tool kit built over the first couple of years, and safety gear you buy yourself. The cheap door is harder to walk through than it looks: you have to find a contractor or a union hall willing to take on a green helper, and in a slow building year those spots dry up.
Filing the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) can make a community college certificate nearly free, but you do not need one. Most carpenters are hired as a helper and taught on the job.
Hourly, with overtime
Time and a half past 40 hours in most states. Long weeks are normal when a job is behind schedule.
Union scale
A local agreement sets the rate, plus health coverage and a pension paid on top of the hourly wage.
Piece rate
Some framing crews pay by the square foot. It rewards speed, and punishes anyone slow or careful.
Your own contracting business
Quoting jobs, buying material before you get paid, chasing customers for the last check.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Nobody needs a degree. The question is whether you learn in a registered apprenticeship or just on somebody's crew.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Shop, geometry and drafting. A summer as a laborer on a site tells you more than a year of reading about it.
Get on a crew, or apply to an apprenticeship
0 to 6 months
Either get hired as a laborer or helper, or apply to a joint apprenticeship program run by a union local or a contractors association.
Registered apprenticeship
4 years
The standard shape is about 2,000 paid hours on the job each year plus at least 144 hours of classroom time, over four years.
Journeyman carpenter
Year 4 or 5
You can read a set of plans, lay out a building, run your own section and be left alone with it.
Lead carpenter or foreman
Year 6 onward
Running a crew, ordering material, dealing with the general contractor and the inspector.
Woodworking and shop
The most useful class in the building for this job.
Geometry and trigonometry
Roof pitches, stair rise and run, square corners. You will use it every single day.
Drafting or computer-aided design
Plans are how the whole job gets communicated.
English
Contracts, safety rules and building codes are all written documents.
You do not need a license to work as a carpenter for somebody else in any state. The moment you want to contract directly with a homeowner, that changes. Most states require a contractor license, and several are strict: California, Nevada and Arizona all make you document years of experience, pass a trade exam and a business and law exam, and post a bond before you can bid a job. What travels with you as an employee is not a license at all. It is a record of training, like the craft credentials from NCCER (the National Center for Construction Education and Research), logged under your own number.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Concrete formwork
Building the molds that hold poured concrete. Commercial work, higher pay, more union jobs.
Finish carpentry and trim
Doors, casing, crown, stairs and built-ins. Slower, cleaner, and paid for precision.
Layout
Using a laser and a total station to set out a whole building. The person who does layout is the person who becomes foreman.
Welding
Useful on commercial sites and it pays extra the day you need it.
Scaffold and fall protection training
Short courses that let you work where other people are not allowed.
A driver's license and a truck
Sites move. Crews expect you to get yourself and your tools there at 6:30 in the morning.
A 30 hour construction safety card
Required on a lot of commercial and public sites before you can set foot on them.
Spanish
On a huge number of American job sites it is the language of the crew.
Photographs of everything you build
This trade hires on what you can show and who will vouch for you.
A lot of carpenters end up running a two or three person remodeling outfit. The carpentry is the easy half. The hard half is quoting a kitchen accurately, carrying liability insurance and workers compensation, buying lumber before the customer pays you, and holding your nerve when somebody changes their mind after the walls are open. The people who make it usually spent five or ten years on somebody else's crew first, learning how long things really take.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Tools on site by 6:30 or 7. A stretch and a short talk about what is dangerous today. Then layout lines snapped on a deck, walls built flat and stood up, sheathing and windows in. Lunch out of a cooler at 11:30. Afternoon is whatever the crew is behind on, plus cleanup, because a messy site is how people get hurt. In winter, in a cold state, you do all of that in gloves. In July in the South you do it by 2pm and then drink water.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America says it has over half a million members, which makes it one of the largest building trades unions in North America. It runs its own international training center and a network of local training funds.
NCCER (the National Center for Construction Education and Research) has logged more than 26 million training completions across roughly 5,600 training locations. Your credentials sit under a personal number that any contractor can verify.
Falls from roofs, ladders and unguarded edges are the biggest single cause of death on American construction sites. That is why harness and guardrail rules are enforced so hard, and why a fall protection card is worth having.
The government career profile flags carpentry as a bright outlook occupation, meaning new openings are very likely and the field is expected to grow quickly. Most construction trades are not rated that way.
Last checked September 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in United States dollars, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published pay scales. They vary by state, employer and experience. Tuition is for in-state students at public schools unless the card says otherwise.