Other Specialty Trade Contractors

The median filer grossed $24,532, or $2,044 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.

589,854 filings make this a crowded field. Crowding is not automatically bad, but it does mean the price of the work is set by whoever will do it cheapest.

19.1% of filers grossed $100,000 or more, which is high for this dataset. A substantial share of this field is running an actual business rather than an occasional one.

Going independent in a specialty trade converts a wage into a bid, and suits people who can estimate, schedule and chase payment as well as they can do the work.

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.

Bottom quarter under $7,788, top quarter over $78,654: 10.1x, or $5,905 a month. At this stretch the label has stopped describing one occupation, and every summary statistic about it — including the midpoint — should be treated with suspicion.

The bottom quarter of Other Specialty Trade Contractors earns under $7,788 — $42,232 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 if you have never priced a job. Underbidding is the most common way people in this trade work a full year for nothing.

Of 589,854 filers in 2022, 30.0% took under $10,000 across the whole year in gross receipts: 177,074 people. Whatever the working version of Other Specialty Trade Contractors looks like, a third or more never reach it.

Take it as a floor, not an estimate. The $10,000 threshold is measured on money received, before materials, rent, fuel, insurance and self-employment tax, so the true share of filers who ended the year with no income is higher than the figure shown — we simply cannot say how much higher.

At 10.1x, the gap between $7,788 and $78,654 is the shape of a field with a small, well-paid top. $24,532 is real and it is not a forecast — the people quoting the upper end at you are describing a minority.

Put in money rather than ratios: $7,788 at the 25th percentile, $24,532 at the midpoint, $78,654 at the 75th. $70,866 separates the quarter of Other Specialty Trade Contractors at the bottom from the quarter at the top.

Between $7,788 and $78,654 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $24,532. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $54,122; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $70,866.

$16,744 below the midpoint, $54,122 above it. That asymmetry is extreme even for this data, and it means every summary of Other Specialty Trade Contractors 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 $3.74 an hour at the 25th percentile, $11.79 at the midpoint and $37.81 at the 75th. Read them as revenue per hour worked; the equivalent wage is lower by whatever this work costs to do.

Counted straight off the return: 110,099 filers grossed under $5,000, 66,998 took $5,000 to $9,999, 121,624 took $10,000 to $24,999, 112,609 cleared $100,000 and 41,467 cleared $250,000.