Light Truck Drivers 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 ($29,580) to the 90th ($79,630). 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

With 994,410 jobs nationally, Light Truck Drivers make up 0.64% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 117,250 of those jobs, the top three states hold 26.2%, and the deepest concentration sits in South Dakota (location quotient 1.50, 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: $36,670 at the 25th percentile, $44,140 at the middle, $52,460 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $50,050, a ratio of 2.7 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

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 117,250 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Alaska would lead at $52,000. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Light Truck Drivers stands number 34 by employment and number 651 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 16% less than its group median, and it supplies 7.3% of the group's 13,645,590 jobs. In 22 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $44,140, 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 57,980 jobs, 5.8% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 393 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

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, $25,810 a year, against $60,930 in Memphis, TN-MS-AR. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $44,140 works out to $3,678 a month before taxes, $1,698 per biweekly paycheck, and $849 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($36,670) to the 75th ($52,460) is worth $15,790 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 $48,554 would sit between the median ($44,140) and the 75th percentile ($52,460), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $36,670, is $7,470 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Conveyor Operators and Tenders, Passenger Attendants, Material Moving Workers, All Other, Transportation Inspectors, Air Traffic Controllers, Taxi Drivers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.