Cargo and Freight Agents Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Cargo and Freight Agents worker at that point in the distribution, so $62,230 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 97,800 people in May 2024, 0.06% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 14,940 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 31.9% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Hawaii, whose location quotient of 4.81 says this work is 4.81 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

One in ten workers in this field earns $37,240 or less, and one in ten earns $76,350 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.1 to 1 and the annual gap is $39,110. The mean ($55,420) versus median ($49,900) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

The state spread for Cargo and Freight Agents runs from the $68,400 median in South Dakota down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in California (14,940 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Cargo and Freight Agents stands number 275 by employment and number 521 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Office and Administrative Support Occupations, the group median wage is $47,850 across 54 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 4% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.5% of the group's 18,218,060 jobs. In 22 of the 45 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $49,900, 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

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 9,020 jobs, 9.2% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 158 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Laredo, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $39,300 a year, against $66,390 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Cargo and Freight Agents paycheck, gross, is $1,919 every two weeks on an annual $49,900, which is $4,158 a month and $960 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($43,490) to the 75th ($62,230) is worth $18,740 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $54,890 would sit between the median ($49,900) and the 75th percentile ($62,230), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $43,490, is $6,410 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Office and Administrative Support Occupations

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Reservation and Transportation Ticket Agents and Travel Clerks, Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators, Public Safety Telecommunicators, Human Resources Assistants, Except Payroll and Timekeeping, Order Clerks, Library Assistants, Clerical. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.