Driver/Sales Workers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($21,760) to the 90th ($59,730). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 417,420, or 0.27% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 38,930 jobs; the top three states sum to 23.5% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Maryland posts a location quotient of 1.90, 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 $59,730, which is 2.7 times the $21,760 at the 10th, a difference of $37,970 annually. Because the mean wage ($39,670) sits above the median ($37,130), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

The state spread for Driver/Sales Workers runs from the $47,240 median in Hawaii down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in Texas (38,930 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Driver/Sales Workers stands number 89 by employment and number 757 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 29% less than its group median, and it supplies 3.1% of the group's 13,645,590 jobs. In 21 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $37,130, 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 23,350 jobs, 5.6% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $23,190 a year, against $57,640 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Driver/Sales Workers paycheck, gross, is $1,428 every two weeks on an annual $37,130, which is $3,094 a month and $714 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($29,120) to the 75th ($47,590) is worth $18,470 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 $40,843 would sit between the median ($37,130) and the 75th percentile ($47,590), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $29,120, is $8,010 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

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Crane and Tower Operators, Captains, Mates, and Pilots of Water Vessels, Locomotive Engineers, Sailors and Marine Oilers, Aircraft Service Attendants, Conveyor Operators and Tenders. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.