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This article presents ongoing research on the payrolls of the workshops of the Grand Duke of Tuscany between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries, focusing here on the first period of the registers, corresponding to the two Medici Grand Dukes, Francis I and Ferdinand I. These exceptional sources are used to retrace the history of wages. How were wages fixed in highly qualified sectors, outside the corporate system? What were the pay scales and how large was the “skills premium”? Did this reflect an individualization of pay or, on the contrary, a strong tendency towards standardization? The main aim here is to reintroduce working hours into the calculation of wages and to show the advantages of a qualitative study of individual pay.