Highway Maintenance 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 ($35,030) to the 90th ($69,210). 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 151,750, or 0.10% of the U.S. total. New York leads the state table with 14,200 jobs; the top three states sum to 24.0% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: South Dakota posts a location quotient of 3.91, 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 $69,210, which is 2.0 times the $35,030 at the 10th, a difference of $34,180 annually. Because the mean wage ($51,410) sits above the median ($49,070), 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, 49 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Connecticut at $63,770; the jobs leader is New York:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Highway Maintenance Workers stands number 203 by employment and number 545 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 10% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.4% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 23 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $49,070, 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 7,710 jobs, 5.1% 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $22,290 a year, against $71,690 in Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA. 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

The median annual wage of $49,070 works out to $4,089 a month before taxes, $1,887 per biweekly paycheck, and $944 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($41,540) to the 75th ($59,600) is worth $18,060 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $53,977 would sit between the median ($49,070) and the 75th percentile ($59,600), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $41,540, is $7,530 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

Sibling occupations in Construction and Extraction Occupations: Service Unit Operators, Oil and Gas, Helpers--Pipelayers, Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters, Tile and Stone Setters, Insulation Workers, Floor, Ceiling, and Wall, Excavating and Loading Machine and Dragline Operators, Surface Mining, Pipelayers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.