Earth Drillers, Except Oil and Gas Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Earth Drillers, Except Oil and Gas ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $49,720. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 17,410 Earth Drillers, Except Oil and Gas jobs in May 2024, which is 0.01% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Idaho, where the location quotient is 6.88, meaning the occupation holds 6.88 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 1,400 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 21.7% of the national total.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $87,760, which is 2.0 times the $44,450 at the 10th, a difference of $43,310 annually. Because the mean wage ($63,260) sits above the median ($59,600), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 1,400 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Massachusetts would lead at $80,780. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Earth Drillers, Except Oil and Gas stands number 585 by employment and number 415 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Construction and Extraction Occupations, the group median wage is $54,660 across 60 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 9% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.3% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 24 of the 48 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $59,600, 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 550 jobs, 3.2% 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, Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $64,570 a year, against $80,340 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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 Earth Drillers, Except Oil and Gas paycheck, gross, is $2,292 every two weeks on an annual $59,600, which is $4,967 a month and $1,146 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($49,720) to the 75th ($73,530) is worth $23,810 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 $65,560 would sit between the median ($59,600) and the 75th percentile ($73,530), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $49,720, is $9,880 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Construction and Extraction Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Floor Sanders and Finishers, Underground Mining Machine Operators, All Other, Rock Splitters, Quarry, Pile Driver Operators, Roof Bolters, Mining, Paperhangers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.