Traffic Technicians Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Traffic Technicians worker at that point in the distribution, so $74,480 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 7,580, or 0.00% of the U.S. total. New York leads the state table with 970 jobs; the top three states sum to 32.1% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Nevada posts a location quotient of 2.97, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

One in ten workers in this field earns $38,060 or less, and one in ten earns $85,810 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.3 to 1 and the annual gap is $47,750. The mean ($61,310) versus median ($58,480) 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, 36 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is California at $80,570; the jobs leader is New York:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Traffic Technicians stands number 722 by employment and number 432 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 12% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.1% of the group's 13,645,590 jobs. In 18 of the 35 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $58,480, 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 790 jobs, 10.4% 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, $71,490 a year, against $71,490 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $4,873 a month before tax, $2,249 biweekly, $1,125 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($46,690) to the 75th ($74,480) is worth $27,790 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 $64,328 would sit between the median ($58,480) and the 75th percentile ($74,480), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $46,690, is $11,790 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

Sibling occupations in Transportation and Material Moving Occupations: Ambulance Drivers and Attendants, Except Emergency Medical Technicians, Transportation Workers, All Other, Tank Car, Truck, and Ship Loaders, Aircraft Cargo Handling Supervisors, Subway and Streetcar Operators, Ship Engineers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.