Pump Operators, Except Wellhead Pumpers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Pump Operators, Except Wellhead Pumpers ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $47,270. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 12,600, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 4,280 jobs; the top three states sum to 56.0% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Wyoming posts a location quotient of 10.33, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $47,270 at the 25th percentile, $60,020 at the middle, $75,160 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $51,810, a ratio of 2.4 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 4,280 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Illinois would lead at $84,590. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Pump Operators, Except Wellhead Pumpers stands number 648 by employment and number 411 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 15% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.1% of the group's 13,645,590 jobs. In 19 of the 35 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $60,020, 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 1,540 jobs, 12.2% 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, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $65,280 a year, against $65,820 in Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX. 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 $60,020 works out to $5,002 a month before taxes, $2,308 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,154 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($47,270) to the 75th ($75,160) is worth $27,890 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 $66,022 would sit between the median ($60,020) and the 75th percentile ($75,160), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $47,270, is $12,750 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: Railroad Conductors and Yardmasters, Crane and Tower Operators, Captains, Mates, and Pilots of Water Vessels, Locomotive Engineers, Sailors and Marine Oilers, Aircraft Service Attendants. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.