Barbers

A median of $38,210 against the $50,020 all-occupation figure leaves Barbers 24% behind — $11,810 across a year. Whether that is workable depends almost entirely on where you would be doing it.

Employment as Barbers is 15,000 nationally. At that size a large city holds a working market and a small one holds almost none, so where you live changes the number of employers available to you by an order of magnitude.

Personal appearance work suits people who build a book of regular clients and keep them for years — the skill gets you hired once, the relationship is what pays.

No verified preparation time is on file for Barbers. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.

$27,390 separates the bottom quarter of Barbers at $31,570 from the top quarter at $58,960. At a 1.9x ratio the midpoint is a weak guide to your own first year — find out which end you would be entering at.

The bottom quarter of Barbers earns under $31,570 — $18,450 below the $50,020 national midpoint, or $15.17 an hour. A floor that low means the occupation cannot be judged on its median alone; a quarter of the people in it are somewhere else entirely.

Avoid it if you cannot stand all day, or if you would not enjoy the client-building side, which is most of the income.

There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 15,000 people employed as Barbers; it did not count the people who trained for it and are doing something else, and a rate built without that denominator would be a number we made up.

A ratio of 1.9x — $31,570 to $58,960 — is wide enough that specialising inside Barbers pays measurably. $38,210 is the middle of a range you can move within.

The middle half of this field earns between $31,570 and $58,960. That is $27,390 of range, with $38,210 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.

Getting to $58,960, the 75th percentile, is worth $20,750 a year more than the $38,210 midpoint and $27,390 more than the $31,570 a quarter of Barbers settle for.

$6,640 below the midpoint, $20,750 above it. That asymmetry is extreme even for this data, and it means every summary of Barbers that is not a median — including any average you see quoted elsewhere — is describing the top of the range rather than the middle.

On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Barbers is $18.37 an hour. The quarters sit at $15.17 and $28.34, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.