Automotive Mechanical and Electrical Repair and Maintenance

The median filer grossed $22,764, or $1,897 a month before expenses. That is an operating business at part-time scale: enough revenue to be worth running properly, not enough to be the only thing in the household.

198,257 people filed under this code. A field that large has a settled price, a settled set of expectations, and no shortage of people willing to meet both.

A 16.4% share — 32,514 filers — grossed $100,000 or more. That is well above what most codes here manage, and it says the middle of Automotive Mechanical and Electrical Repair and Maintenance is closer to a business than to a sideline.

This suits people whose customers come back and send others, since in repair work reputation is the whole marketing budget.

There is no training requirement to file under this code — which is precisely why so many people appear in the bottom bands. Entry being free is not the same as the work being viable.

The top quarter of Automotive Mechanical and Electrical Repair and Maintenance earns 8.4x the bottom quarter — under $7,967 against over $66,855, a spread of $58,888. Distributions this stretched are usually two different jobs sharing one label, and any average across them means little.

The bottom quarter of Automotive Mechanical and Electrical Repair and Maintenance earns under $7,967 — $42,053 below the $50,020 a typical American job pays. Entering at the bottom and waiting is a live risk here, not a theoretical one, and some people never leave that quarter.

Do not start this without a plan for parts and tooling costs, which are a bigger share of this trade than people expect.

30.0% — 59,477 of the 198,257 filers in 2022 — grossed under $10,000 for the year. That is not the tail of the distribution, it is a third of it, and it is measured before any expense came out.

Read that as a floor, not an estimate. Census publishes gross receipts, not net income, so everyone inside that share earned less than $10,000 suggests once costs came out — and filers who grossed well above $10,000 may still have netted nothing.

A ratio of 8.4x between the quarters is the signature of a winner-take-most distribution. $22,764 is a real number about a real population, but nobody entering Automotive Mechanical and Electrical Repair and Maintenance should plan around it.

The middle half of this field earns between $7,967 and $66,855. That is $58,888 of range, with $22,764 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.

Getting to $66,855, the 75th percentile, is worth $44,091 a year more than the $22,764 midpoint and $58,888 more than the $7,967 a quarter of Automotive Mechanical and Electrical Repair and Maintenance settle for.

$14,797 below the midpoint, $44,091 above it. That asymmetry is extreme even for this data, and it means every summary of Automotive Mechanical and Electrical Repair and Maintenance that is not a median — including any average you see quoted elsewhere — is describing the top of the range rather than the middle.

Converted to a 2,080-hour year, the receipts run $3.83 an hour at the 25th percentile, $10.94 at the midpoint and $32.14 at the 75th. Read them as revenue per hour worked; the equivalent wage is lower by whatever this work costs to do.

The raw counts, before anyone interprets them: under $5,000, 35,088 filers. $5,000 to $9,999, 24,397. $10,000 to $24,999, 46,588. Over $100,000, 32,500 — and 9,940 over $250,000.