Rotary Drill Operators, Oil and Gas 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 Rotary Drill Operators, Oil and Gas ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $52,600. 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

BLS counted 13,090 Rotary Drill Operators, Oil and Gas jobs in May 2024, which is 0.01% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Oklahoma, where the location quotient is 10.96, meaning the occupation holds 10.96 times its national share of local jobs. Texas employs the most people outright, 5,940 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 66.1% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $52,600 at the 25th percentile, $65,010 at the middle, $81,550 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $55,760, a ratio of 2.3 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

California posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $99,470, and Texas the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Rotary Drill Operators, Oil and Gas stands number 640 by employment and number 332 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 19% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.2% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 13 of the 25 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $65,010, 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 1,660 jobs, 12.7% 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, Lafayette, LA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $47,900 a year, against $86,010 in Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $5,418 a month before tax, $2,500 biweekly, $1,250 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($52,600) to the 75th ($81,550) is worth $28,950 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $71,511 would sit between the median ($65,010) and the 75th percentile ($81,550), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $52,600, is $12,410 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Miscellaneous Construction and Related Workers, Septic Tank Servicers and Sewer Pipe Cleaners, Solar Photovoltaic Installers, Insulation Workers, Mechanical, Helpers, Construction Trades, All Other, Floor Layers, Except Carpet, Wood, and Hard Tiles. The full directory is on the Careers hub.