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Power line installers

Official title Electrical Power-Line Installers and Repairers (SOC 49-9051)

Also called Lineman, Lineworker, Power lineman, Journeyman lineman, Transmission lineman

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 131,070 US power line installers, with median pay of $95,320 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 65,000 from 1930, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for power line installers: GIS, ADMS, and digital field tools, 2010 to 2022.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 10.3% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Power line installers: jobs and pay since 1930 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/49-9051

Chicago

Future History. "Power line installers: jobs and pay since 1930." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/49-9051.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_49_9051, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Power line installers: jobs and pay since 1930}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/49-9051}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

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1850187519001925195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Telegraph Lineman / Wire Stringer
Known then as Electric Light and Power Lineman (unorganized era)
Known then as Electrical Lineman / Line Worker (IBEW apprenticeship era)
Known then as Power Lineman / Line Crew Worker (rural electrification and postwar buildout era)
Known then as Power-Line Installer and Repairer (BLS classification era)
Known then as Electrical Power-Line Installers and Repairers (BLS SOC 49-9051)
Known today as Electrical Power-Line Installers and Repairers (BLS SOC 49-9051)
Projected to still be called Electrical Power-Line Installers and Repairers (BLS SOC 49-9051)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
131K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$95,320
Est.

≈ $92,876 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1844

May 24, 1844: Samuel Morse taps out "What hath God wrought?" at the US Capitol, and the message travels forty miles of wire strung between poles to Baltimore. The men who set those poles and strung that wire were the first linemen. The telegraph network grew rapidly: Chicago's first telegraph station opened in 1848; by 1861, telegraph lines spanned the continent. Line work was unglamorous and physically hard but not particularly dangerous.

Beat · 1882

September 4, 1882: Thomas Edison's Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan begins supplying electricity to 82 customers and 1,284 lamps. Edison designed the system around direct current at low voltage carried through buried copper conductors. The six 27-ton dynamos generated 100 kilowatts each. By 1884 the station served 508 customers with more than 10,000 lamps. The arc lamp and incandescent bulb created the first commercial demand for electric power infrastructure, and the linemen who built and maintained that infrastructure entered an era that would prove far more dangerous than the telegraph work they had done before.

Beat · 1891

November 21, 1891: A convention of electrical workers meets at a boarding house in St. Louis, Missouri, organized by Henry Miller, a traveling lineman who had watched colleagues die from electrocution and recognized that individual workers had no power to negotiate safety standards. The convention forms the National Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which receives an AFL charter on December 7, 1891. At the 1899 Pittsburgh convention, the name is changed to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. The IBEW will go on to establish the apprenticeship programs and safety standards that gradually reduce the occupation's death rate from roughly one-in-three per career to rates comparable to other construction trades.

Beat · 1936

May 20, 1936: President Roosevelt signs the Rural Electrification Act, authorizing federal loans through the Rural Electrification Administration to extend power to rural America. In 1935, only about 12% of American farms had electricity; by 1950, nearly 80% did; by 1960, the figure was close to 95%. The REA construction surge employed tens of thousands of line crews who traveled from project to project, stringing hundreds of thousands of miles of distribution line across every corner of the country. The REA era roughly doubled the line-worker workforce and established rural electric cooperatives as a major employer alongside the investor-owned utilities.

Beat · 1948

March 1948: O.G. Anderson and M.R. Parkin of A.B. Chance Company change suspension insulators on the 287,000-volt Hoover Dam to Los Angeles transmission line while the line remains energized. It is the first documented live-line maintenance operation at transmission voltage, using specially designed insulated tools. The demonstration proves that trained linemen with the right tools can work safely on the highest-voltage lines in service, expanding the scope of live-line practice and reducing the need to de-energize major transmission circuits for routine maintenance.

Beat · 1992

The Energy Policy Act of 1992 initiates wholesale electricity deregulation. Through the 1990s, investor-owned utilities anticipate competitive pressure and aggressively cut costs by reducing internal line-crew staffing, shifting construction work to lower-cost contract firms, and closing internal apprenticeship programs. The US Department of Labor identified the resulting workforce shortage as a "critical concern" in a 2005 report. The hiring pause of the 1990s combined with the retirement of the postwar lineman generation created a structural workforce gap that persists into the 2020s, worsened by the closure of many technical high schools and vocational programs that might have replenished the talent pool.

Beat · 2026

Goldman Sachs publishes analysis in May 2026 characterizing the lineworker shortage as a "full-blown crisis" that threatens to become a binding constraint on the grid buildout needed to power AI data centers. The analysis estimates that AI-driven electricity demand will require tens of thousands of miles of new transmission and distribution infrastructure over the next decade. The US already has an estimated 45% of its current lineworker workforce within 10 years of retirement age, approximately 198 training programs nationally (typically producing graduates over a 4-5 year apprenticeship), and an industry that lost a decade of recruitment and training investment during the 1990s deregulation era. The occupation that began with forty miles of wire between Washington and Baltimore in 1844 now faces a demand surge driven by the most compute-intensive technology ever built.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace power line installers? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+10.3%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 49-9051 (Electrical power-line installers and repairers): 131.9 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 145.5 thousand in 2035, a change of +13.6 thousand (+10.3%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (0.3% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
0%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 49-9051.00 Electrical Power-Line Installers and Repairers. Shown: human-rated β = 0, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0; GPT-4-rated β 0. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for power line installers

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereInspect overhead and underground lines for clearance violations, insulation degradation, and vegetation encroachment, logging findings in mobile GIS applications such as Esri ArcGIS Field Maps synced to the enterprise network model.

Inspect overhead and underground lines for clearance violations, insulation degradation, and vegetation encroachment, logging findings in mobile GIS applications such as Esri ArcGIS Field Maps synced to the enterprise network model.[8],[3]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Use GIS field apps to capture precise GPS-attributed defect records; accurate field data feeds the predictive-maintenance models that determine where your crew goes next, making data quality a direct career differentiator.

AI is sitting alongside you hereUse AI-flagged drone imagery and GIS priority maps to plan and execute targeted fault repairs on distribution circuits, replacing damaged insulators, conductors, and hardware identified by automated anomaly detection.

Use AI-flagged drone imagery and GIS priority maps to plan and execute targeted fault repairs on distribution circuits, replacing damaged insulators, conductors, and hardware identified by automated anomaly detection.[9],[10]

Where your edge is

Learn to interpret AI defect-detection outputs (annotated image reports) and integrate GIS priority queues into daily work order workflows; workers who own this loop get dispatched to higher-value repairs faster.

AI is sitting alongside you hereCoordinate storm-response crew deployment, communicate outage locations and repair status to dispatch using mobile field-reporting tools, and validate safety clearances before and after restoration.

Coordinate storm-response crew deployment, communicate outage locations and repair status to dispatch using mobile field-reporting tools, and validate safety clearances before and after restoration.[6],[1]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Adopt digital field-reporting workflows; workers fluent in crew-tracking apps and mobile outage-status updates are promoted to lead roles faster and are positioned for foreman or supervisor tracks.

Where power line installers go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

Experienced line workers with a strong grasp of protection systems, switching orders, and ADMS network models can transition into electrical engineering technologist roles supporting transmission planning, relay protection, or grid-interconnection studies. The pivot leverages deep practical knowledge of how circuits actually behave while adding formal analysis skills.

What you'd add
  • · Associate degree or certificate in electrical engineering technology
  • · Power systems analysis software (ETAP, PowerWorld, or similar)
  • · Protection relay settings and coordination fundamentals
  • · AutoCAD or Bentley MicroStation for single-line diagram drafting
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of power line installers changed since 1844?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Wood pole and iron wire (telegraph and early telephone era)

    The first linemen set wooden poles by hand, attached porcelain or glass insulators to crossarms, and strung iron wire that carried low-voltage telegraph and telephone signals. The tools were simple: a digging bar, a climbing strap wrapped around the pole, and pliers. The current was harmless to the touch. Workers learned on the job with no formal training; the occupation required physical strength and a tolerance for outdoor work at height, but not specialized electrical knowledge.

  • Bare-hand AC distribution (electrocution era; no insulation, no training)

    The introduction of alternating current at distribution voltages (thousands of volts) in the 1890s transformed line work from a physically demanding trade into one of the deadliest occupations in the United States. Linemen worked bare-handed on energized conductors because the industry had no insulation standards and no understanding of the specific voltages that were lethal. The IBEW, founded in 1891, was a direct response to this death rate: the founding convention in St. Louis cited "no training and safety standards" as the primary organizing grievance. The decade from 1890 to 1900 saw approximately one in three linemen killed on the job.

    Effect on the work

    The death rate was so high that contemporaries described line work as a transient occupation; workers who survived moved on. The supply of workers willing to take the job was maintained by the premium wages that utilities paid to compensate for the hazard.

  • Early hot-line tools: wood and Sitka spruce sticks (A.B. Chance forerunners, from 1913)

    The earliest forerunners of modern insulated hot-line tools appeared around 1913, with the first documented photographs of them taken in 1914. These were wooden sticks, initially made from Sitka spruce chosen for its combination of light weight, strength, and electrical resistivity, that allowed a lineman to manipulate energized equipment from a safe distance rather than contacting it directly. In the mid-1940s, A.B. Chance Company began applying plastic coatings over the wood to improve insulation. The tools did not eliminate the risk of contact with energized conductors during climbing or stringing operations, but they created the first class of tasks that could be done without direct contact with live wire. Working with insulated tools on energized lines is still called "hot-stick work."

    Effect on the work

    Hot-line tools reduced fatalities on maintenance tasks and enabled live-line work on energized circuits, eliminating the need to de-energize (and thus interrupt service to customers) for routine maintenance. This both improved safety and expanded the productive capacity of each line crew.

  • Rural Electrification Administration boom (REA line-crew mobilization, 1936-1945)

    President Roosevelt signed the Rural Electrification Act on May 20, 1936, authorizing federal loans to build electric distribution lines to the most American farms that private utilities had declined to electrify. The REA funded the construction of hundreds of thousands of miles of rural distribution lines over the following decade, employing a generation of line crews that traveled from project to project across the country. Workers called "boomers" followed the construction wave, living in temporary camps and moving between states as contracts were completed. By 1945, most rural American homes had electric service. The REA era roughly doubled the line-worker workforce and institutionalized the pattern of contract construction crews that persists today alongside the permanent utility maintenance workforce.

    Effect on the work

    The REA construction program created an estimated tens of thousands of new line-worker jobs over the 1936-1945 period, drawing workers from agriculture and general construction into a new trade with IBEW-negotiated wages. The program also established rural electric cooperatives as a major employer of line workers alongside investor-owned utilities.

  • Hydraulic aerial bucket truck (Buck Manufacturing Co., 1946; widespread utility adoption 1950s-1960s)

    Leonard H. Buck founded Buck Manufacturing Co. in 1946 and produced the first hydraulic aerial bucket truck, an insulated boom mounted on a vehicle chassis that could lift a lineman to the height of the conductors without the need to climb a pole. The utility industry adopted the bucket truck rapidly through the 1950s and 1960s. For distribution-voltage work, an insulated boom bucket eliminated the physical hazard of climbing while also improving productivity: a bucket-truck crew can complete in a few hours a reconductoring job that might have taken a climbing crew a full day. Bucket trucks did not replace pole-climbing for transmission-line work or for distribution structures where a truck cannot access, but they transformed the daily experience of the majority of distribution linemen from a climbing-intensive job to a mixed-platform job.

    Effect on the work

    The bucket truck improved per-crew productivity substantially on distribution maintenance work, but did not reduce employment because grid expansion and increasing maintenance requirements absorbed the productivity gains. The truck also reduced on-the-job fatalities by removing the requirement to free-climb energized structures for many routine tasks.

  • Rubber-glove live-line method and high-voltage hot-stick milestones (A.B. Chance, 287 kV Hoover Dam line, 1948)

    In March 1948, O.G. Anderson and M.R. Parkin of A.B. Chance Company's Hot Line Tool division used specially designed insulated tools to change suspension insulators on the 287,000-volt Hoover Dam to Los Angeles transmission line while the line remained energized. This was a landmark in live-line working at transmission voltage: before 1948, de-energizing a high-voltage line for maintenance was considered mandatory. Fiberglass replaced wood and plastic in hot-stick construction during the 1960s, providing superior insulation and lower weight.

  • Deregulation and contracting-out (utility downsizing, OSHA subpart V, 1990s)

    The Energy Policy Act of 1992 initiated deregulation of wholesale electricity markets, and through the 1990s utilities anticipated competitive pressure and cut costs aggressively. Internal line-crew staffing was reduced; construction and some maintenance work was contracted out to non-union crews at lower IBEW wage rates. At the same time, many utilities closed their internal apprenticeship programs and reduced safety training investment. OSHA's 1994 revision of Subpart V (electric power generation, transmission, and distribution standard) was a significant safety regulation that required minimum approach distances from energized conductors by voltage class and mandated personal protective equipment, formalizing practices that IBEW had developed over decades. The deregulation era produced a decade-long hiring slowdown that, combined with the retirement wave of the postwar generation of linemen, created the workforce shortage that utilities began reporting urgently in the 2000s.

    Effect on the work

    Employment of electrical power-line installers declined or stagnated through the 1990s as utilities downsized internal crews. BLS data shows employment in the high 100,000s in the early 1990s declining to 96,200 by 2000. The knowledge and training infrastructure lost in this decade was not recoverable quickly; industry analysts identified the resulting workforce gap as a "critical concern" as early as 2005.

  • GIS, ADMS, and digital field tools (Esri Field Maps, SCADA mobile integration)

    Advanced Distribution Management Systems (ADMS) deployed through the 2010s by large investor-owned utilities gave line crews real-time network models on tablets and ruggedized mobile devices. Where a crew chief once drew on paper maps and telephone-dispatched switching orders to find a fault, workers now arrive at a scene with a color-coded GIS priority map showing the network topology, which switches to open, and what switching orders have been issued. Esri ArcGIS Field Maps, adopted widely after 2020, enabled field linemen to capture GPS-attributed defect records that fed directly into the enterprise network model and work-order system. The tooling did not reduce the number of linemen needed; it improved the accuracy of dispatch, reduced the time to isolate faults, and improved the quality of the asset data that predictive-maintenance models depend on.

  • AI-powered drone inspection and autonomous asset monitoring (Buzz Solutions PowerAI, Skydio, Percepto)

    AI-powered drone inspection platforms reached commercial maturity around 2021-2022. Buzz Solutions' PowerAI and similar systems (FlyPix AI, Skydio-Firmatek for utility poles) analyze drone and aerial imagery automatically to detect conductor damage, insulator defects, hardware wear, and vegetation encroachment, outputting annotated reports with GIS-linked defect locations and severity ratings. Before these tools, detecting line defects required a lineman to physically climb or view each structure, covering perhaps many poles per crew-day. AI inspection platforms can screen thousands of structures per day via drone. A Skydio-Firmatek deployment reduced pole inspection time by 92% at one utility. The effect on line worker employment is not displacement: the technology identifies which structures need human attention and dispatches linemen to the highest-priority repairs. Workers who can interpret AI defect reports and integrate GIS priority queues into their workflow are positioned as higher-value crew members.

    Effect on the work

    AI inspection has shifted line-worker time away from patrol and routine visual inspection toward targeted repair and maintenance on defects the AI has flagged. This is a productivity amplifier, not a headcount reducer, given the existing shortage of line workers relative to the grid's maintenance needs.

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Electrical Power-Line Installers and Repairers employment and pay by year

On record since1844
Latest US employment131,070 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$95,320 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+10.3% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • Canada (NOC 72203)

    Employment, 2020
    13,300, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 72203 Electrical power line and cable workers, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
    Median pay, 2020
    C$117,000, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 72203 Electrical power line and cable workers, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.
View all 27 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
193065,000n/aEst., Construction Physics Researched contextReport
194095,000n/aEst., Living New Deal Researched contextReport
1960120,000$5,800Est., Construction Physics (employment) Researched contextEst., University of Missouri Libraries (pay) Researched contextReport
200096,200$45,780BLS OEWS 2000 Official statisticReport
200395,190$48,960BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
2004101,760$49,100BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
2005106,060$50,150BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
2006110,520$50,780BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
2007109,990$52,570BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
2008111,580$55,100BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
2009108,980$56,670BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
2010105,540$58,030BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
2011105,570$60,190BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
2012112,450$63,250BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
2013111,350$64,170BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
2014114,540$65,930BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015115,380$66,450BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016117,670$68,010BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017116,650$69,380BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018114,800$70,910BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019111,660$72,520BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020114,930$75,030BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021123,940$78,310BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022119,510$82,340BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023120,170$85,420BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024123,680$92,560BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025131,070$95,320BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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