Rail-Track Laying and Maintenance Equipment Operators Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Rail-Track Laying and Maintenance Equipment Operators worker at that point in the distribution, so $79,330 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 16,480, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. New York leads the state table with 3,330 jobs; the top three states sum to 33.2% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Wyoming posts a location quotient of 6.20, 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: $51,630 at the 25th percentile, $67,370 at the middle, $79,330 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $39,120, a ratio of 1.9 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 New York first at 3,330 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Maryland would lead at $90,410. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Rail-Track Laying and Maintenance Equipment Operators stands number 594 by employment and number 304 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 23% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.3% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 15 of the 36 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $67,370, 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 2,540 jobs, 15.4% 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, New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $77,340 a year, against $77,340 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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 Rail-Track Laying and Maintenance Equipment Operators paycheck, gross, is $2,591 every two weeks on an annual $67,370, which is $5,614 a month and $1,296 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($51,630) to the 75th ($79,330) is worth $27,700 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 $74,107 would sit between the median ($67,370) and the 75th percentile ($79,330), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $51,630, is $15,740 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: Underground Mining Machine Operators, All Other, Rock Splitters, Quarry, Pile Driver Operators, Roof Bolters, Mining, Paperhangers, Terrazzo Workers and Finishers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.