How to become an electrician in Virginia: get paid to train.

01 THE PAY

How much do electrician apprentices make in Virginia?

The median starting wage was $17.34 an hour across 4,569 recent starting records: half were above it and half were below. Separately, recent completers had a median recorded wage of $24.05 an hour. These are different groups of apprentices, not the same people tracked from start to finish. The middle half of starting wages fell between $14.79 and $20.00 an hour.

02 HOW TO APPLY

How to apply, and how long it takes

No experience needed. At the largest program open to outside applicants, you apply to a job posting, not to a school. M.C. Dean's postings ask for a high school diploma or GED with zero months of experience, a valid driver's license with a good record, reliable transportation, and a passed background check and drug test, and the company says applicants must be at least 18. Its own instructions are three steps: go to its careers site, search for apprentice openings, and apply to one near you.

Finishing takes about four years. The Richmond apprenticeship requires 8,000 hours on the job plus 720 hours of classroom instruction, held one full day every other week from 7:30 am to 3:30 pm. Each of the four years has two $600 registration days, $4,800 in all, and you buy safety-toe boots, basic tools, and a laptop. The committee's page says completers receive paperwork to apply for the state journeyman license, and that sitting for the state test is not required.

The largest sponsors are employers and a shipyard school. M.C. Dean, the state's largest, is an electrical contractor training its own hires. Newport News Shipbuilding runs The Apprentice School, which charges no tuition, takes applications with no deadline, and warns that admission is competitive; the shipyard work requires U.S. citizenship for the security clearance, and electrician is the school's largest trade. The school tells applicants their pay only after an offer, but in the federal records its recent electrician apprentices started at a median of $21.74 an hour. Norfolk Naval Shipyard hires apprentices through a federal apprenticeship announcement when one is open. The union committees in Richmond and Norfolk train with participating contractors, and many smaller programs are individual companies training their own employees. Pick two or three programs near you, search each program's name with its city, and check how and when they accept applications.

03 THE PROGRAMS

Every registered electrician apprenticeship in Virginia

All 536 programs, ranked by each sponsor's total apprentices at the latest federal count. The bar shows that total. For the 91 sponsors that train more than one trade, the count includes apprentices in their other trades as well. Ranks cover all 536 programs. Prison-run programs keep their overall rank but are listed separately below. A zero means no apprentices were recorded in training in this dataset; it does not necessarily mean the program has closed.

04 LICENSING

Virginia licenses you in your own name