Transit and Railroad Police Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Transit and Railroad Police worker at that point in the distribution, so $114,040 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

BLS counted 3,000 Transit and Railroad Police jobs in May 2024, which is 0.00% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in New York, where the location quotient is 5.23, meaning the occupation holds 5.23 times its national share of local jobs. New York employs the most people outright, 970 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 50.7% of the national total.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $141,870, which is 2.4 times the $58,370 at the 10th, a difference of $83,500 annually. Because the mean wage ($91,820) sits above the median ($82,320), 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 New York first at 970 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, California would lead at $109,810. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Transit and Railroad Police stands number 788 by employment and number 196 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Protective Service Occupations, the group median wage is $58,610 across 24 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 40% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.1% of the group's 3,654,920 jobs. In 5 of the 8 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $82,320, 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 1,110 jobs, 37.0% 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, $105,930 a year, against $105,930 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: $6,860 a month before tax, $3,166 biweekly, $1,583 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($65,920) to the 75th ($114,040) is worth $48,120 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 $90,552 would sit between the median ($82,320) and the 75th percentile ($114,040), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $65,920, is $16,400 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Protective Service Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Police and Sheriff's Patrol Officers, Correctional Officers and Jailers, Firefighters, First-Line Supervisors of Police and Detectives, Lifeguards, Ski Patrol, and Other Recreational Protective Service Workers, Detectives and Criminal Investigators. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.