Commitment 2 of 4
You should not have to call five schools and a union hall to find out whether year one pays you or bills you.
So we called the records instead. Every figure carries the name of the public document it came from.
Why this exists
Trade schools are easy to find. Paid apprenticeships are not. Brochures talk about careers. Almost nobody puts tuition next to first-year pay, for programs close enough to reach, with the public record named underneath.
TradeFooting is that comparison. It is for people leaving school, changing careers, or trying not to sign the wrong paper.
What you will see
A trade. A place. Programs you can actually compare. What it costs, or what it pays you.
Start with your ZIP code. What matters is what you can reach.
What you will not see
A sales floor. Rankings that money bought. Guessed wages. A promise that we cover every program in America.
If a number cannot be tied to a public record, it does not appear.
Who it is for
Anyone about to spend a year, and often real money, on training. If you are in Iowa, Texas, New York, or California, the product is the same: pick a trade, then your state.
Where AI is used, and where it is not
The listings are pulled by software from public registers: state apprenticeship agencies, the US Department of Labor, the Department of Education, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Software does the collecting and the arithmetic. It does not decide what a program pays.
No figure on this site is written by an AI model. Every number is copied from a named public source, and each one shows that source and the date we retrieved it. If a source does not publish a number, we leave it blank. We would rather show a gap than fill one.
The written guidance, including the guides on applying, was drafted with AI assistance and then edited and checked by a person before publishing. Where those pages describe what is common rather than what is certain, they say so.
Who is behind this
TradeFooting is published independently. It is not owned by, funded by, or affiliated with any school, union or agency listed on it. If a figure here is wrong, [email protected] reaches the person who maintains the site, and the corrections page says what happens next.