Editorial Standards

Every factual claim on ElectricianDB traces to a source in the following priority order. Higher sources override lower ones when they conflict:

1. Primary sources — official certifying bodies (NABCEP.org, NETA.org, BICSI.org), regulatory agencies (OSHA.gov, DOL.gov, SAM.gov), and state licensing boards. Fees, prerequisites, and requirements always come from here.
2. Live job postings with disclosed pay — direct URLs to company careers pages and job boards, quoted verbatim where cited. Postings must be active or archived within 90 days.
3. BLS OES data — official government wage statistics, used as the anchor for occupation-level pay claims.
4. Payscale with sample size ≥50 respondents — self-reported but large-sample; smaller samples are never cited.
5. Named industry surveys with methodology (HeatSpring, iRecruit) — cited with the survey name so readers can judge the methodology themselves.
6. Community forums (Mike Holt, TestGuy, EngineerBoards) — quoted for real questions and lived experience, never as authoritative salary claims.

• Glassdoor aggregate estimates
• ZipRecruiter aggregate estimates (except when quoting a specific job posting, or explicitly labeled as corroborating data alongside a primary source)
• Salary.com aggregate estimates
• Levels.fyi (limited electrical trade coverage)
• PayScale samples below 50 respondents

Aggregate estimator sites exist to attract job-seeker traffic, not to publish accurate trade wages. We use them only to corroborate primary data — never as the sole basis for a pay claim.

• Retracted claims — for example, we do NOT republish DCGeeks' retracted "$12-18K Uptime ATD premium." A retraction means the number is dead; repeating it with caveats still spreads it.
• Fabricated statistics, including unsourced pass rates.
• Unsourced claims of any kind — if we cannot cite it, we do not print it.
• Misleading pass rates — where bodies do not publish pass rates (NABCEP, Uptime), we say so explicitly instead of laundering forum rumors into facts.

When we discover an error, we correct it in place with an "Updated: [date]" note on the affected page. Substantive corrections — wrong fees, wrong prerequisites, wrong pay figures — get a strikethrough of the original claim plus an explanation of what changed and why. We do not silently rewrite history.

• Quarterly review of all reference pages.
• Fee schedules verified against source URLs monthly.
• Live-data pages (prevailing wage, per diem, job counts) refresh weekly via automated ingestion.

Content is researched using AI tools plus human editorial review. Every citation is manually verified against its source before publication. AI is a research assistant, not the source of authority — no AI-generated claim ships without a human-checked citation behind it.

We participate in affiliate programs with HeatSpring, 360training, Mike Holt Enterprises, Amazon Associates, and others. We only recommend products we would recommend without the commission. Every page with affiliate links carries full FTC-compliant disclosure next to the link — never buried, never omitted.