Home and household

The household trade is the one most people practice without calling it a trade. Its professional form is the general maintenance and repair worker, whom O*NET defines as someone who performs work involving the skills of two or more maintenance or craft occupations: pipe fitting, HVAC maintenance, insulating, welding, machining, carpentry, electrical and mechanical repair, and the repair of floors and stairs.

Because the work borrows from every other trade, its tool list is the longest of any occupation mapped in this archive. O*NET records 203 distinct tool commodities for general maintenance and repair workers, and its core tasks name hammers, hoists, saws, drills, wrenches, levels, plumb bobs and straightedges, and precision measuring and electrical testing instruments. The household kit is therefore a cross-section of the trades, and most of its tools have a specialized professional cousin documented elsewhere in this archive.

O*NET OnLine, the occupational database of the US Department of Labor, reports for Maintenance and Repair Workers, General (49-9071.00), 1,621,800 people in 2025, a median wage of $23.84 an hour ($49,590 a year), projected growth for 2025–2035 described as average (3% to 4%), and 148,700 projected job openings.