Rail Car Repairers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Rail Car Repairers offer sit among all 18,300 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

BLS counted 18,300 Rail Car Repairers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.01% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Wyoming, where the location quotient is 6.33, meaning the occupation holds 6.33 times its national share of local jobs. Texas employs the most people outright, 2,190 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 28.4% of the national total.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $46,330 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($92,000) is 2.0 times the 10th percentile ($45,670), a gap of $46,330 a year. The mean of $67,610 sitting above the median of $65,680 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Massachusetts posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $97,660, and Texas the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Rail Car Repairers stands number 578 by employment and number 322 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations, the group median wage is $59,300 across 51 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 11% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.3% of the group's 6,045,030 jobs. In 16 of the 39 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $65,680, 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 660 jobs, 3.6% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 20 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, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $53,340 a year, against $89,430 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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 Rail Car Repairers paycheck, gross, is $2,526 every two weeks on an annual $65,680, which is $5,473 a month and $1,263 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($51,640) to the 75th ($80,150) is worth $28,510 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 $72,248 would sit between the median ($65,680) and the 75th percentile ($80,150), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $51,640, is $14,040 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Industrial Machinery Mechanics, Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Mechanics and Installers, Bus and Truck Mechanics and Diesel Engine Specialists, Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Workers, All Other, Mobile Heavy Equipment Mechanics, Except Engines, Automotive Body and Related Repairers. The full directory is on the Careers hub.