Operating Engineers and Other Construction Equipment Operators 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 ($40,080) to the 90th ($100,690). 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 469,270 jobs nationally, Operating Engineers and Other Construction Equipment Operators make up 0.30% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 55,290 of those jobs, the top three states hold 25.7%, and the deepest concentration sits in Wyoming (location quotient 4.58, 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: $47,780 at the 25th percentile, $58,710 at the middle, $75,750 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $60,610, a ratio of 2.5 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 Texas first at 55,290 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Hawaii would lead at $105,440. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Operating Engineers and Other Construction Equipment Operators stands number 77 by employment and number 426 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 7% more than its group median, and it supplies 7.4% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 29 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $58,710, 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

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX is the largest metro employer with 13,150 jobs, 2.8% 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $29,640 a year, against $112,050 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. 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 annual wage of $58,710 works out to $4,892 a month before taxes, $2,258 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,129 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($47,780) to the 75th ($75,750) is worth $27,970 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 $64,581 would sit between the median ($58,710) and the 75th percentile ($75,750), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $47,780, is $10,930 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: Plasterers and Stucco Masons, Earth Drillers, Except Oil and Gas, Rail-Track Laying and Maintenance Equipment Operators, Helpers--Brickmasons, Blockmasons, Stonemasons, and Tile and Marble Setters, Carpet Installers, Continuous Mining Machine Operators. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.