Subway and Streetcar Operators Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Subway and Streetcar Operators offer sit among all 9,200 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

May 2024 employment stood at 9,200, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. Utah leads the state table with 900 jobs; the top three states sum to 27.0% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Utah posts a location quotient of 8.81, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $87,940, which is 1.7 times the $52,260 at the 10th, a difference of $35,680 annually. Because the mean wage ($75,620) sits close to the median ($84,830), 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 Utah first at 900 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Washington would lead at $86,750. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Subway and Streetcar Operators stands number 694 by employment and number 182 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 62% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.1% of the group's 13,645,590 jobs. In 1 of the 9 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $84,830, 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 3,960 jobs, 43.0% 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, $87,620 a year, against $87,620 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

As a household number, $84,830 a year is $7,069 a month gross, $3,263 every two weeks, $1,631 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($59,500) to the 75th ($87,940) is worth $28,440 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $7,069 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $93,313 would sit between the median ($84,830) and the 75th percentile ($87,940), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $59,500, is $25,330 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: Machine Feeders and Offbearers, Railroad Conductors and Yardmasters, Crane and Tower Operators, Captains, Mates, and Pilots of Water Vessels, Locomotive Engineers, Sailors and Marine Oilers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.