How this site makes money, and how it ranks

How the comparison works

A trade. A place. Cost. First-year pay. National pages are ranges. State pages are where the dollars get real.

Where the figures come from

Registered apprenticeship records from federal and state sources come first. Then state agencies, published catalogs, and program pages. Marketing sites and paid listings are not primary sources. Each figure is tied to a source and a date. If we cannot find a number, we leave it blank rather than guess.

A program earns its own page when the record gives us a sponsor and a program name, a city and a state, a trade the record names rather than one we guessed from the title, and at least one money figure: a first-year wage, a cost, or a published tuition. One figure clears the bar. We do not hold a program back for missing the other two.

Some records stop at a sponsor and a town. Either the source publishes no cost and no wage for them, or it names no occupation, which would leave us guessing the trade from the program title. Those go in a separate band, never mixed into the ranked list, because knowing a sponsor exists ten miles away is worth something. We do not print a figure next to a trade we guessed, and we do not guess the figure either.

What we will not invent

We do not guess wages. We do not invent an open seat. Tuition may leave out tools, exam fees, or living costs; wage may be first-year only or one local scale. We show what we have and note what is missing.

Missing from this site does not always mean the program does not exist. Coverage is incomplete. We add places when the numbers are there. We would rather wait than pad a page.

You will not see a guessed wage, an invented open seat, an unlabeled paid listing, or a “best” or “guaranteed” claim with no source behind it. Where a state and a trade have nothing publishable, we say so on the page rather than padding it.

No registry in the country publishes when applications open. So we do not print intake dates, and we do not let a card imply a seat is waiting. We tell you the program is active, and we tell you to call.

How the list is ordered

If a page has both apprenticeships and trade schools, paid-training programs sit at the top. That is the whole rule. Year one is usually a paycheck on one path and a bill on the other. You can still read every program.

Within each group we prefer the records with more you can check: a trade the record names, with a money figure and an outcome figure behind it, then a published first-year wage, then a link that goes to the sponsor itself, then a registry status of active. Distance sorts what is left, and it never reorders the groups above it.

Ads, partnerships, and clicks never change the order. If a paid program ever sits above a paid apprenticeship, that is a mistake. Tell us.

Advertising

There are no paid listings today. The only commercial activity is an optional email so we can tell you when we add a trade or state. We will not sell the order of programs, present paid content as a regular listing, or hand your email to schools. If that changes, paid listings would be labeled, kept apart from the regular list, and posted here first.