Crane and Tower Operators
What the pay figures show
- Hawaii comes first for crane and tower operators on every measure. $124,260 on paper. Still first after tax. Still first at $93,136 once you adjust for what things cost. When the headline and the reality agree, say so plainly.
- For crane and tower operators, Hawaii's $124,260 median is the highest nominally, after tax, and after regional price adjustment, at $93,136. Concordance across all three measures is uncommon and worth stating explicitly, because the absence of a reordering is itself the finding for this occupation.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$68,080
People doing it
42,890
Highest paid
$124,260
HI
Best off, really
$93,136
NV, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$42,640
Highest tenth
$103,570
Lowest, really
$39,910
AR
States with data
50
National average
$72,130
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
96.98%
NV, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Geography does a lot of the work in this job. Pay roughly doubles between the lowest state and the highest. Tax and prices narrow that gap. They come nowhere near closing it — the real range is still $39,910 up to $93,136.
- Only 42,890 people do this job in the whole country. It is a small field, so the pay figures rest on fewer reports.
- This job is not published everywhere — 50 jurisdictions have a figure, with $68,080 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. Hawaii tops the ones that are.
- The nominal spread for crane and tower operators approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $39,910 to $93,136, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- National employment in crane and tower operators is 42,890. ⚠️ At this headcount the state-level medians rest on comparatively thin samples, and year-to-year movement in any one state reflects sampling as much as wages.
- 50 jurisdictions carry a published median for crane and tower operators. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Crane and Tower Operators
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $42,640 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $68,080 |
| Top tenth earn over | $103,570 |
| This salary | $68,080 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in Crane and Tower Operators
The national median for this job
$68,080around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $42,640 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $68,080 |
| Top tenth | $103,570 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Crane and Tower Operators, state by state
The national median for this job
50states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $41,600 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Hawaii · $124,260 |
| Spread | $82,660 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $73,280 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $75,410 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| NV | $115,840 | $90,323 | $93,136 |
| HI | $124,260 | $88,197 | $81,206 |
| RI | $104,340 | $78,630 | $77,535 |
| ND | $82,890 | $66,786 | $75,403 |
| WA | $101,110 | $79,961 | $73,655 |
| AK | $92,490 | $73,897 | $72,651 |
| MT | $82,800 | $63,763 | $70,656 |
| WY | $77,970 | $63,682 | $70,097 |
| NJ | $100,640 | $75,409 | $69,257 |
| MA | $98,150 | $73,291 | $67,713 |
| SD | $71,000 | $58,779 | $66,722 |
| KS | $77,100 | $59,056 | $65,644 |
| MD | $87,950 | $66,889 | $64,338 |
| MN | $80,930 | $61,784 | $62,778 |
| TX | $73,280 | $60,382 | $62,138 |
| IA | $67,600 | $54,430 | $61,317 |
| NY | $85,850 | $65,187 | $60,568 |
| CT | $81,360 | $62,342 | $60,124 |
| CO | $77,120 | $60,399 | $59,576 |
| VT | $72,760 | $57,325 | $59,321 |
| OR | $83,260 | $60,668 | $57,933 |
| WI | $67,720 | $53,905 | $57,902 |
| OK | $63,590 | $50,914 | $57,669 |
| FL | $71,560 | $59,172 | $57,198 |
| LA | $61,170 | $49,881 | $56,462 |
| MS | $61,260 | $49,044 | $56,184 |
| UT | $67,410 | $53,253 | $56,055 |
| NM | $62,400 | $50,551 | $55,928 |
| SC | $64,120 | $51,765 | $55,556 |
| KY | $62,000 | $49,945 | $55,207 |
| NC | $64,480 | $51,926 | $55,158 |
| CA | $79,570 | $61,500 | $54,627 |
| AZ | $67,350 | $54,929 | $54,329 |
| NE | $60,720 | $48,909 | $54,118 |
| TN | $59,410 | $49,916 | $53,954 |
| PA | $65,190 | $52,559 | $53,906 |
| AL | $60,790 | $48,406 | $53,802 |
| ME | $65,690 | $51,848 | $53,398 |
| VA | $66,600 | $52,614 | $52,223 |
| OH | $57,620 | $47,609 | $51,855 |
| MO | $58,450 | $47,335 | $51,584 |
| GA | $62,050 | $49,540 | $51,231 |
| MI | $59,740 | $47,893 | $50,850 |
| NH | $63,310 | $53,050 | $50,358 |
| WV | $54,830 | $44,588 | $49,668 |
| IL | $61,820 | $48,937 | $49,504 |
| DE | $60,160 | $47,747 | $48,106 |
| IN | $52,950 | $43,193 | $46,855 |
| ID | $52,770 | $42,637 | $46,636 |
| AR | $41,600 | $34,525 | $39,910 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of crane and tower operators earn less than the figures here and half earn more, and experience, employer and city move an individual a long way from the middle. Nationally the middle earns $68,080.
- Take-home figures for crane and tower operators assume one person filing alone, with no dependants and nothing going into a pension before tax. Any of those lowers the tax and raises what you keep, so treat these as the plain case rather than your case. Local city income taxes are not included either, and in a few states those matter. In Nevada, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $90,323.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for crane and tower operators. Inside any state, a big city costs far more than a small town, so this is a fair way to compare states with each other and a poor way to price a specific move. The wage figures and the price figures are also from different years. At the bottom of the range sits Arkansas, on $39,910.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for crane and tower operators, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $68,080, with half of workers below it; dispersion within a state routinely exceeds the dispersion between states, driven by tenure, employer size, sector and metropolitan area. An individual's position in the distribution is not predictable from geography alone.
- Take-home calculations for crane and tower operators assume a single filer with no dependants, the standard deduction, and no pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions. Each omitted item reduces taxable income, so the figures function as a lower bound on retained pay for this household shape; the highest such figure is $90,323, in Nevada. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- Real-terms results for crane and tower operators rest on statewide regional price parities, which average over intra-state variation that is itself larger than much of the interstate variation. They support comparison between states and not the pricing of an individual relocation; Arkansas anchors the distribution at $39,910. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.