Crane and Tower Operators Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Crane and Tower Operators offer sit among all 42,000 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

May 2024 employment stood at 42,000, or 0.03% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 6,650 jobs; the top three states sum to 26.7% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Louisiana posts a location quotient of 3.37, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $102,400, which is 2.5 times the $41,670 at the 10th, a difference of $60,730 annually. Because the mean wage ($71,560) sits above the median ($66,370), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 50 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Nevada at $129,930; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Crane and Tower Operators stands number 416 by employment and number 316 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 27% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.3% of the group's 13,645,590 jobs. In 29 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $66,370, 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

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX is the largest metro employer with 2,390 jobs, 5.7% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 164 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, Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $66,630 a year, against $132,880 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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

As a household number, $66,370 a year is $5,531 a month gross, $2,553 every two weeks, $1,276 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($50,970) to the 75th ($81,630) is worth $30,660 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $5,531 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $73,007 would sit between the median ($66,370) and the 75th percentile ($81,630), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $50,970, is $15,400 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

Sibling occupations in Transportation and Material Moving Occupations: Bus Drivers, Transit and Intercity, Refuse and Recyclable Material Collectors, Parking Attendants, Flight Attendants, Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers, Automotive and Watercraft Service Attendants. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.