Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers offer sit among all 2,070,480 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 2,070,480, or 1.34% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 212,700 jobs; the top three states sum to 25.6% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Arkansas posts a location quotient of 1.87, 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 $78,800, which is 2.0 times the $38,640 at the 10th, a difference of $40,160 annually. Because the mean wage ($58,400) sits above the median ($57,440), 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, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Alaska at $64,890; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers stands number 13 by employment and number 448 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 10% more than its group median, and it supplies 15.2% of the group's 13,645,590 jobs. In 25 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $57,440, 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 64,440 jobs, 3.1% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Aguadilla, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $22,640 a year, against $80,160 in Lincoln, NE. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers paycheck, gross, is $2,209 every two weeks on an annual $57,440, which is $4,787 a month and $1,105 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($47,230) to the 75th ($65,520) is worth $18,290 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 $63,184 would sit between the median ($57,440) and the 75th percentile ($65,520), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $47,230, is $10,210 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: Railroad Brake, Signal, and Switch Operators and Locomotive Firers, Ambulance Drivers and Attendants, Except Emergency Medical Technicians, Transportation Workers, All Other, Tank Car, Truck, and Ship Loaders, Aircraft Cargo Handling Supervisors, Subway and Streetcar Operators. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.