What millwork drafters get paid

The spread is enormous and nobody publishes it, so everyone calibrates against a stranger's comment and comes away either underpaid or furious.

Being written, and honest about it

Real numbers need sources that can be named. What follows is what has been opened and read, and it is not much yet:

$13–16 an hour for drafting, with projects between $100 and $20,000 — an offshore CAD outsourcing vendor's own advertised pricing for itself, not a survey. Its "from $7 an hour" is for converting paper or PDF drawings into CAD, not for shop drawings. Treat these as the floor a seller wants you to see.

Two figures that were here earlier have been removed: a drafting manager's outsourcing budget, and a salary range said to circulate on Reddit. Both were read in a search-results snippet rather than in the thread itself, which is not good enough to print. They go back up when the threads are opened.

Wanted, and worth more than any of it: job postings with rates on them, the outsourcing firms' published price lists, and drafters saying what they are actually on. Send one and it goes up with the source named.

What nobody has measured yet

Drafters say the job, the sector and the software change what you earn. No published survey splits millwork pay that way, so this page does not put a number on any of them. The full sourced figures, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are in chapter 30 of the guide.

Where the competition is

The same package can be bought offshore by the hour. That is the ceiling your employer is quietly pricing against, whether or not it ever comes up.