Estimate medieval guild wages and apprenticeship costs the way a 14th or 15th-century family in London or Bruges might have — premium fees paid to a master, wages forgone during training, and journeyman earnings once the indenture ended.
Pick a craft to auto-fill typical historical figures, or adjust the sliders and number fields yourself. Enter the premium fee paid up front to a master, the going daily wage for a qualified journeyman in pence, how many years the apprenticeship lasts, and how many years the apprentice would later work as a journeyman before becoming a master. Click Calculate to see the total training investment, a year-by-year wage table, and an approximate modern-dollar comparison.
Understanding medieval guild wages and apprenticeship costs helps explain why craft skills stayed within families and how social mobility actually worked in the 1300s-1500s. A typical goldsmith's premium in London might run around six pounds — while rare, exceptionally prestigious livery-company placements are recorded exceeding £100, decades of a laborer's wages. A baker's apprenticeship, by contrast, might cost a family only 10 shillings. Historians, genealogists tracing indenture records, teachers building lesson plans, and reenactors pricing a "living history" economy all need a quick way to translate pence, shillings, and pounds into a comparable total. This calculator turns scattered guild archive figures (Merchant Taylors', Goldsmiths' Company, London city records) into a single, comparable number so you can see, for example, that a seven-year mason's apprenticeship represented roughly £45-50 in forgone wages plus whatever premium the family paid — often more than a small cottage cost at the time.
The tool uses two core historical facts about English guild economics: apprentices earned no cash wage (only room, board, and training) and were bound by an indenture typically lasting seven years under later statute; masters charged an up-front premium fee that varied enormously by craft prestige.
Total Apprenticeship Cost = Premium Fee + (Journeyman Daily Wage × Working Days/Year × Apprenticeship Years)
The second term represents the opportunity cost — the wages the young person could have earned as an unskilled laborer during those training years. After the indenture ends, journeyman earnings are simply Daily Wage × Working Days × Years. For the "Master" stage, this tool applies an illustrative 1.5× multiplier to the journeyman rate — a simplified midpoint of the roughly 1.3×-1.6× differentials seen in long-running English building-wage series such as the Phelps Brown-Hopkins index. Treat this multiplier as a reasonable estimate for comparison purposes, not a precise figure for any single guild or town.
Take a stonemason's apprentice in London, circa 1400. Premium fee: 40 shillings. Journeyman daily wage: 6 pence. Apprenticeship: 7 years. Working days per year: 260.
Medieval English guilds bound apprentices by legal indenture, usually for seven years, formalized nationwide by the Statute of Artificers (1563) though the custom predates it by centuries. Apprentices lived with their master, received food and lodging but no wage, and their families often paid a premium — recorded in company registers from a few shillings for a baker to well over £100 in rare, exceptionally prestigious cases such as certain London Goldsmiths' Company placements. After completing the term, a young worker became a "journeyman" (from French journée, a day's work), earning a daily wage, before eventually producing a qualifying "masterpiece" to join the guild's ruling body as a full master craftsman.
No — apprentices typically received no cash wage. In exchange for training, they got room, board, and clothing from their master, while their family usually paid an upfront premium fee for the privilege.
Seven years was the standard term in England, formalized by the Statute of Artificers in 1563, though it was already common custom in guild towns well before that.
A journeyman was a trained craftsman who had completed apprenticeship and could work for daily wages, but had not yet produced a "masterpiece" to be admitted as a full guild master.
It varied enormously by trade — a few shillings for a baker's apprentice up to £100 or more in rare, exceptionally prestigious cases like certain goldsmith placements, based on surviving London livery company records. Most crafts fell far below that extreme.
It's a rough approximation based on comparing medieval grain-wage purchasing power to modern prices (roughly $4 per medieval silver penny). It's useful for getting a feel for scale, but it is not a rigorous CPI-style currency conversion, so treat it as illustrative only.
It's a simplified midpoint drawn from long-running English building-wage records (such as the Phelps Brown-Hopkins wage series), which show master craftsmen typically earning somewhere between 1.3× and 1.6× a journeyman's daily rate. This tool uses 1.5× as a single illustrative figure, not an exact historical constant.
Most guilds strictly limited the number of apprentices per master — often just one or two — to protect wage levels and maintain quality standards across the craft.
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