How many tradies are in Australia?

Employment by trade, largest first

Electricians are the biggest trade at 197,300 employed, ahead of carpenters and joiners on 149,600, motor mechanics on 112,600 and plumbers on 107,600. The counts below are Jobs and Skills Australia trend figures for February 2026, built on the ABS Labour Force Survey.

"Change, year to Feb 2026" is movement over the past year, February 2025 to February 2026. It is not a forecast.

Earnings are median weekly full-time earnings for employees before tax (ABS survey, May 2025). Self-employed and contractor income is not included. n/a means the ABS sampling error was too high to publish.

For comparison, across all occupations the median age is 39 and median full-time earnings are $1,852 a week.

These 14 are the hands-on trades the word "tradie" usually means. The full ABS group also counts chefs, hairdressers and technicians. See "What counts as a tradie?" below.

February 2026 is the final quarter of occupation figures published under the ABS's ANZSCO classification. The next refresh moves to the new OSCA classification and may re-baseline these numbers. Details in the methodology at the end of this page.

What about businesses and apprentices?

462,939 construction businesses were actively trading at 30 June 2025, and 208,950 trade apprentice contracts were in training at 31 December 2025. Neither number is a headcount of working tradies: one counts ABNs, the other counts training contracts, and both are worth reading on their own terms.

Construction businesses

A "business" here is an actively trading ABN, which includes one-person sole traders. A self-employed electrician appears once in the employment count and once again here, so business counts never add to headcounts.

Trade apprentices

NCVER counts training contracts rather than individual people, and an apprentice who restarts with a new employer signs a new contract. Construction, automotive and engineering, and electrotechnology trades together hold about 82% of all trade contracts in training.

Why is there no licensed-tradie total?

No national figure exists, and none can honestly be built. Licensing is state-based, one tradie can hold several licences, companies hold them too, and mutual recognition lets one person appear on two states' registers. Adding state licence counts together produces a number that measures paperwork, not people.

The Queensland plumbing row is the whole lesson in one line: 33,731 licences sit with 17,538 people, because most plumbers hold both a plumber licence and a drainer licence. NSW runs a public verify-a-licence register through Fair Trading, but we could find no published aggregate total, which is why you won't see a NSW row in tables like this one.

What counts as a tradie?

Every headline number here uses the ABS group Technicians and Trades Workers: occupations needing a Certificate III or IV, or higher, in a trade or technical field. It is the closest thing Australia has to an official tradie count, and it is broader than the hard-hat image suggests.

• Construction trades
• Electrotechnology and telecommunications trades
• Automotive and engineering trades
• Engineering, ICT and science technicians
• Food trades: chefs, bakers, butchers
• Skilled animal and horticultural workers
• Other trades: hairdressers, cabinetmakers, boat builders

There is a second official lens: industry. The Construction industry employed 1,375,300 people in the same quarter, which counts everyone on a construction firm's books, office staff included, and misses tradies working in mining, manufacturing or anywhere else. Occupation follows the person. Industry follows the workplace. Serious reporting picks one lens per claim and says which.

• Occupation only: a tradie working in mining, manufacturing or anywhere outside construction
• Both: a tradie on a construction firm's books
• Industry only: office and support staff at a construction firm

Reading any tradie statistic

How many electricians are in Australia?

197,300 electricians were employed in Australia at February 2026, the biggest single trade in the country and 7,200 more than a year earlier. It is also a young trade: the median electrician is 33, and just over half are under 35 on JSA's published age profile. Median full-time earnings for employee electricians are $2,191 a week, behind only bricklayers and stonemasons in the table above.

How many plumbers are in Australia?

107,600 plumbers were employed in Australia at February 2026, up 4,500 over the year, with median full-time employee earnings of $1,990 a week. The licence registers run higher: Victoria alone had a record 32,606 plumbers registered or licensed in 2024-25. Registers count licences rather than working plumbers, which is why the two numbers can both be right (see the licence table above).

How these numbers were put together

Every figure on this page was taken from a primary source on 20 July 2026: ABS datacubes parsed directly, Jobs and Skills Australia's published occupation data file, the QBCC, VBA and Energy Safe Victoria annual reports, and NCVER's December-quarter publication. Nothing here comes from a news story or someone else's blog post.

Reference periods differ by source, so every figure carries its own date. Employment is the February 2026 quarter, businesses are counted at 30 June 2025, apprentices at 31 December 2025, and licences follow each regulator's 2024-25 reporting year.

KINGTRADIE does digital marketing for tradies: custom websites, SEO for trade businesses and Google Ads. We kept needing one sourced page of tradie numbers, could not find it anywhere, and built it. If a figure here looks off, tell us and we will chase it back to the primary source.