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True Trade Path

About

An independent utility for the trades and the people who hire them

True Trade Path publishes free tools that answer specific, consequential questions about entering a trade, doing the work, and taking care of a home. It is funded by advertising, it does not sell rankings, and it does not sell your enquiry.

Founded
2026
Last updated
September 2026
Funding
Display advertising

What this site is

True Trade Path is a reference utility for the skilled trades. It covers three things: how to get into a trade, how to do the work and price it properly, and how to maintain, diagnose and pay for work on a home.

The work behind it is mostly unglamorous. Wage data, employment projections, licensing requirements, code tables, equipment service lives and regional cost indices already exist in public and semi-public sources. They are published in formats that are accurate and close to unusable — multi-tab spreadsheets, PDF appendices, fifty separate state board websites written to fifty different standards. Our job is to turn those into a small number of tools that give you an answer, show their assumptions, and cite where the numbers came from.

The site is new. It was founded in 2026 and is a small operation, not an institution. We would rather say that plainly than imply a scale we do not have. What we can commit to is method: named sources, dated figures, visible assumptions, and a correction process that works.

Who it is for

Three audiences, each with a different question, all standing on the same body of information. A homeowner asking what a panel upgrade should cost and an electrician pricing that upgrade are looking at two sides of one set of numbers, and both are better served when the numbers are the same.

People entering a trade

You are deciding between trades, between an apprenticeship and a school, or between the trades and a degree. The information you need is comparative and financial: what the work is actually like, what entry costs, how long it takes, what it pays at each stage, and what the licence requires in your state. Most of that exists in public data and almost none of it is presented in a form you can make a decision with.

Working tradespeople

You need the calculation right and you need it now, usually on a phone, often with a glove on. You also need the business side to hold up: a shop rate that recovers overhead, a price that reaches a real margin, and a job that is still profitable after the change orders. Field calculators and pricing tools are the same discipline applied to different arithmetic.

Homeowners

Something has failed, you do not know what it is, you do not know what it should cost, and you are about to spend several thousand dollars on the advice of whoever answers the phone. The gap is not effort, it is information: what the failure probably is, what the repair typically costs in your region, whether repair still makes sense, and whether the quote in front of you is reasonable.

Why tools rather than articles

Almost every question in this subject area has a numeric answer that depends on your specifics. What size wire, what size unit, how many bags of concrete, what the job should cost, whether the apprenticeship pays back faster than the certificate. An article can only describe the method and hand the arithmetic back to you. A tool does the arithmetic, and it does it with your numbers rather than the example numbers a writer chose.

There is a commercial reason the internet is full of the opposite. Long articles carry more advertising, rank for more phrases and take longer to read. A tool that answers your question in one screen is worse for those metrics and better for you. We have accepted that trade deliberately, and it constrains how the site is built: ads sit in fixed slots outside the tool, and never between you and a result.

Where we do write at length, it is because the question genuinely is not numeric — what a licence requires, what an inspector looks for, what happens on the first day of an apprenticeship, which terms should appear in a contract before you sign it.

Editorial philosophy

Three rules, in order of precedence. When they conflict with growth, the rules win.

  1. Tools before content

    A calculator that answers your question in ten seconds is worth more than two thousand words circling it. Where a question can be computed, we compute it. Where it cannot, we write as little as the question requires and stop.

  2. Decisions before opinions

    We do not publish best-of lists, editor's picks or rankings of products we have not used. Every page is built to help you reach your own decision with your own numbers, not to move you toward ours.

  3. Trust before promotion

    Anything that would make the site more profitable at the cost of being less reliable is declined. That includes paid rankings, sponsored listings, affiliate-driven recommendations and lead selling. The revenue we give up is the point.

How it is funded

Display advertising, and nothing else. Every tool is free, there is no subscription, there is no account to create, and there is no paid tier that unlocks a better answer.

We do not charge organizations to be listed in the directory, we do not charge for verification, and we do not sell placement, badges or ranking. We do not operate a lead-generation business: when you contact a professional through this site you use that organization’s own published contact details, and your enquiry is not sold to anyone.

Advertisers have no influence over tool logic, cost ranges, directory rankings, verification outcomes or anything we write. The full statement of that separation, and the constraints on where advertising may appear, are in the advertising disclosure.

Read the commitments, not the adjectives

Every site claims to be independent. The useful version of that claim is a specific list of things the operator has agreed not to do, published where it can be held against them. Ours is on the trust and methodology page, and it covers sourcing, verification wording, ranking inputs, reviews and corrections.

What we expect to be judged on

  • Named sources. Where a figure comes from a published dataset, we name the dataset and the period. Where it comes from our own compilation, we say so.
  • Dated figures. Wage data, cost ranges and code references carry the date they were last reviewed. A number without a date is a number you cannot evaluate.
  • Visible assumptions. Every calculated result shows what it assumed. A result you cannot interrogate is not a result you should act on.
  • Stated limits. We say what a tool does not cover, and we say when a licensed professional is not optional.
  • Working corrections. Errors reported to corrections@truetradepath.com are acknowledged within three business days and recorded on the page when they are substantive.

If we fail any of these, tell us. The contact page routes corrections, listing requests, press enquiries and advertising questions to the right place.

Where to start