Sailors and Marine Oilers 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 Sailors and Marine Oilers ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $38,450. 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

The occupation employed 31,360 people in May 2024, 0.02% of every job BLS counted. Louisiana is the largest employer at 7,470 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 49.9% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Louisiana, whose location quotient of 19.21 says this work is 19.21 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $81,890, which is 2.5 times the $33,350 at the 10th, a difference of $48,540 annually. Because the mean wage ($55,320) sits above the median ($49,610), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Louisiana first at 7,470 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Oregon would lead at $68,700. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Sailors and Marine Oilers stands number 473 by employment and number 527 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 5% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.2% of the group's 13,645,590 jobs. In 12 of the 33 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $49,610, 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 4,640 jobs, 14.8% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk, VA-NC posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $46,580 a year, against $66,550 in Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Sailors and Marine Oilers paycheck, gross, is $1,908 every two weeks on an annual $49,610, which is $4,134 a month and $954 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($38,450) to the 75th ($65,370) is worth $26,920 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 $54,571 would sit between the median ($49,610) and the 75th percentile ($65,370), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $38,450, is $11,160 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: Conveyor Operators and Tenders, Passenger Attendants, Material Moving Workers, All Other, Transportation Inspectors, Air Traffic Controllers, Taxi Drivers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.