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Trade Playbook
Low-voltage is the electrical-adjacent business you can start without the five-year apprenticeship — and the questions are about that loophole and its limits: what you can legally do without a 309A, structured cabling vs security vs AV, whether BICSI is worth it, and how to build recurring service revenue instead of chasing one-off installs.
Where it starts
$20–28/hr
Cable puller / installer (entry)
Where it tops out
Business income
Low-voltage business owner
Ontario figures for low-voltage & data cabling, from the first day on site to the top of the trade. Approximate, and worth checking against current collective agreement rates and job postings in your region.
| Stage | Pay | What is going on at this stage |
|---|---|---|
| Cable puller / installer (entry) | $20–28/hr | Terminating and dressing cable — productive in weeks, no apprenticeship. |
| BICSI-certified technician | $30–42/hr | |
| Lead / project technician | More | |
| Low-voltage business owner | Business income | Service and monitoring contracts are the real prize. |
Two low-voltage technicians with the same ticket can be twenty dollars an hour apart because they picked different work.
Cameras, card access, and alarms — with recurring monitoring and service revenue.
Best for: People who want service-contract income.
Every figure above is what low-voltage technicians get paid. It is not what you charge once you run a low-voltage cabling business. Your rate has to carry the hours you are not on the tools, the truck, the tools themselves, WSIB, insurance, the quote you wrote and lost, and the holdback sitting in someone else's account for 60 days. Contractors who set their rate off their old hourly wage are the ones who work every weekend and still cannot say whether the year was profitable.
The step from paid by the hour to paid by the jobRun your own shop, specialize (security, AV, networks), or grow into a full systems-integration business. The asset to build is recurring revenue — monitoring and service contracts — which turns labour into a business. Many low-voltage owners also add managed services and remote monitoring as the high-margin layer.
Wage data, union rate sheets, and the places low-voltage technicians talk about money openly.
The rates above are the market. The live feed is the market this week: which builders and contractors just pulled a permit or won a contract in Ontario, what they are about to need, and who to call.
Electrician Jobs in Ontario: Who Is Hiring Right NowAEC Stack handles incorporation, WSIB, insurance certificates, quoting, invoicing, and chasing the money, so a low-voltage cabling business runs like one with an office behind it.
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