Excavating and Loading Machine and Dragline Operators, Surface Mining Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Excavating and Loading Machine and Dragline Operators, Surface Mining offer sit among all 34,210 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 34,210 jobs nationally, Excavating and Loading Machine and Dragline Operators, Surface Mining make up 0.02% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 4,910 of those jobs, the top three states hold 24.1%, and the deepest concentration sits in Wyoming (location quotient 6.38, 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: $46,290 at the 25th percentile, $52,550 at the middle, $63,630 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $41,320, a ratio of 2.0 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

The state spread for Excavating and Loading Machine and Dragline Operators, Surface Mining runs from the $105,490 median in New Jersey down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in Texas (4,910 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Excavating and Loading Machine and Dragline Operators, Surface Mining stands number 460 by employment and number 482 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 4% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.5% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 31 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $52,550, 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 1,140 jobs, 3.3% 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, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $48,720 a year, against $94,870 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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: $4,379 a month before tax, $2,021 biweekly, $1,011 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($46,290) to the 75th ($63,630) is worth $17,340 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 $57,805 would sit between the median ($52,550) and the 75th percentile ($63,630), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $46,290, is $6,260 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

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Sheet Metal Workers, Drywall and Ceiling Tile Installers, Structural Iron and Steel Workers, Helpers--Electricians, Glaziers, Brickmasons and Blockmasons. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.