Bus Drivers, School Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Bus Drivers, School offer sit among all 387,920 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

With 387,920 jobs nationally, Bus Drivers, School make up 0.25% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: New York alone holds 37,520 of those jobs, the top three states hold 24.6%, and the deepest concentration sits in Alabama (location quotient 2.22, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $37,490 at the 25th percentile, $47,040 at the middle, $56,140 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $36,130, a ratio of 2.3 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Massachusetts posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $63,030, and New York the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Bus Drivers, School stands number 93 by employment and number 596 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Transportation and Material Moving Occupations, the group median wage is $52,310 across 50 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 10% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.8% of the group's 13,645,590 jobs. In 24 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $47,040, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 27,980 jobs, 7.2% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Montgomery, AL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $17,480 a year, against $66,210 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $3,920 a month before tax, $1,809 biweekly, $905 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($37,490) to the 75th ($56,140) is worth $18,650 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $51,744 would sit between the median ($47,040) and the 75th percentile ($56,140), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $37,490, is $9,550 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Transportation and Material Moving Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Sailors and Marine Oilers, Aircraft Service Attendants, Conveyor Operators and Tenders, Passenger Attendants, Material Moving Workers, All Other, Transportation Inspectors. The full directory is on the Careers hub.