Roustabouts, Oil and Gas Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Roustabouts, Oil and Gas offer sit among all 45,330 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 45,330 Roustabouts, Oil and Gas jobs in May 2024, which is 0.03% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in North Dakota, where the location quotient is 21.55, meaning the occupation holds 21.55 times its national share of local jobs. Texas employs the most people outright, 23,800 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 66.6% of the national total.

One in ten workers in this field earns $35,650 or less, and one in ten earns $64,010 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 1.8 to 1 and the annual gap is $28,360. The mean ($49,060) versus median ($47,510) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 25 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Alaska at $63,230; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Roustabouts, Oil and Gas stands number 405 by employment and number 579 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 13% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.7% of the group's 6,361,730 jobs. In 16 of the 25 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $47,510, 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 5,690 jobs, 12.6% 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, Longview, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $43,280 a year, against $51,180 in Pittsburgh, PA. 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $3,959 a month before tax, $1,827 biweekly, $914 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($38,330) to the 75th ($57,170) is worth $18,840 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 $52,261 would sit between the median ($47,510) and the 75th percentile ($57,170), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $38,330, is $9,180 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

Sibling occupations in Construction and Extraction Occupations: Construction and Building Inspectors, Roofers, Sheet Metal Workers, Drywall and Ceiling Tile Installers, Structural Iron and Steel Workers, Helpers--Electricians. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.