Seems plausible. If you click around you find the report explicitly excludes self-employed workers.
>Self-employed persons are not included in the survey or estimates.
Probably because they are entirely different jobs. The “tradesmen” making the big bucks are actually business owners, who are hiring others to clean the toilets and wire circuit breakers. This makes them more like CEOs than individual plumbers. It would not make sense to lump their salaries with employed trade workers.
The last plumber I hired was two brothers, who do good work, charge like $100+/hr on labor, but are considered self employed and thus don't show up in that dataset.
And I’d bet their rate even has to take into account the time in their “off” hours when they are writing estimates, invoicing, communicating with clients, marketing, and so forth.
They don’t just clock out when they finish fixing your plumbing. Even at $100 each, it’s not pure profit. Running the business probably eats into a big chunk of their hourly rate.
So you're prone to falling into survival bias, while also needing skills beyond just being good at your job in order to sell yourself so you can get customers to begin with.
>the initial investment in terms of capital is very little compared to "start a company and hope to break even in an year or two".
2-3 years of apprenticeship is "very little"? In addition to however much experience you need to be trusted as a business? And who's to say you will break even in a year or two?
I think the silver-lining here is: be competent at your job and all aspects related to it, but do that while being your own boss.
Not much different from other areas but in this case, trades are in high demand and the initial investment in terms of capital is very little compared to "start a company and hope to break even in an year or two".