Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers
What the pay figures show
- Two answers for this job. Best paid: Alaska, at $70,100. Tax does not change that. Best off: North Dakota, at $57,717 once local prices count. Tax was not what separated them. Rent was.
- Alaska's $70,100 median for heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers survives the tax adjustment intact, so state income tax is not a differentiator in this occupation's geography. It does not survive price deflation: North Dakota takes the top position at $57,717. Housing is where regional price variation concentrates, which is why the reordering appears at this step and not the previous one.
Compare this career across states
Choose your filing status and local taxes, compare pay, and keep a shortlist.Compare wage and personal-pay outcomes by state, with selected resident local taxes and saved career choices.
Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$58,640
People doing it
2,062,040
Highest paid
$70,100
AK
Best off, really
$57,717
ND, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$40,140
Highest tenth
$79,380
Lowest, really
$41,439
FL
States with data
51
National average
$59,710
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.57%
ND, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Nationally, this job pays within a fairly narrow band. Adjust for tax and for local prices and the band tightens again, to between $41,439 and $57,717. Geography is not the main lever on pay here.
- Roughly 2,062,040 Americans do this job. Hold that scale in mind. A few thousand dollars here is a few thousand dollars across millions of households.
- Coverage is complete — all 51 jurisdictions publish this, on a middle wage of $58,640. Nothing is missing.
- Wages for heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers cluster comparatively tightly across states, and the clustering strengthens after tax and price deflation — a real range of $41,439 to $57,717. Occupation-level factors such as specialisation and employer type therefore explain more of an individual's pay here than location does.
- With 2,062,040 workers nationally, heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers is one of the highest-headcount occupations BLS publishes. Aggregate effects of the differentials described above are correspondingly large, even where the per-worker figures appear modest.
- Coverage for heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers is complete at 51 jurisdictions. No suppression applies, so the highest and lowest figures above are genuinely the national extremes.
Pay band: Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $40,140 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $58,640 |
| Top tenth earn over | $79,380 |
| This salary | $58,640 |
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 Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers
The national median for this job
$58,640around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $40,140 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $58,640 |
| Top tenth | $79,380 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Louisiana · $49,320 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Alaska · $70,100 |
| Spread | $20,780 |
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 | $56,290 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $57,926 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ND | $60,910 | $51,121 | $57,717 |
| AK | $70,100 | $58,145 | $57,165 |
| SD | $58,690 | $49,337 | $56,005 |
| WY | $60,310 | $50,639 | $55,740 |
| NV | $62,290 | $52,230 | $53,856 |
| OH | $59,800 | $49,301 | $53,698 |
| TN | $58,620 | $49,281 | $53,268 |
| IA | $58,070 | $47,244 | $53,223 |
| IN | $60,290 | $48,874 | $53,018 |
| MT | $58,870 | $47,472 | $52,604 |
| NE | $58,390 | $47,143 | $52,163 |
| KS | $58,920 | $46,523 | $51,712 |
| ID | $58,770 | $47,140 | $51,562 |
| VT | $60,830 | $49,153 | $50,864 |
| WI | $58,610 | $47,237 | $50,740 |
| UT | $60,620 | $48,191 | $50,726 |
| KY | $56,340 | $45,595 | $50,399 |
| MN | $61,990 | $49,297 | $50,090 |
| WA | $64,760 | $54,215 | $49,939 |
| OK | $54,410 | $43,950 | $49,782 |
| CO | $61,500 | $49,598 | $48,922 |
| TX | $56,290 | $47,409 | $48,787 |
| MI | $57,180 | $45,945 | $48,782 |
| AR | $51,550 | $42,152 | $48,726 |
| PA | $58,580 | $47,451 | $48,667 |
| MO | $54,550 | $44,384 | $48,369 |
| IL | $60,320 | $47,806 | $48,360 |
| NH | $60,280 | $50,615 | $48,047 |
| RI | $60,190 | $48,706 | $48,027 |
| MS | $51,820 | $41,837 | $47,927 |
| GA | $57,050 | $45,772 | $47,334 |
| AZ | $58,080 | $47,798 | $47,275 |
| NJ | $63,570 | $51,294 | $47,109 |
| ME | $57,050 | $45,489 | $46,849 |
| CT | $60,490 | $48,207 | $46,492 |
| AL | $52,120 | $41,821 | $46,483 |
| MA | $63,030 | $49,993 | $46,188 |
| DE | $57,590 | $45,824 | $46,169 |
| LA | $49,320 | $40,715 | $46,087 |
| DC | $64,170 | $51,016 | $46,042 |
| NM | $50,500 | $41,549 | $45,968 |
| NY | $62,050 | $49,283 | $45,791 |
| MD | $59,360 | $47,420 | $45,611 |
| SC | $51,130 | $42,189 | $45,278 |
| WV | $49,480 | $40,515 | $45,131 |
| VA | $56,860 | $45,358 | $45,021 |
| OR | $61,980 | $47,108 | $44,984 |
| NC | $51,530 | $42,037 | $44,654 |
| HI | $59,820 | $47,142 | $43,405 |
| CA | $60,230 | $48,768 | $43,319 |
| FL | $50,640 | $42,869 | $41,439 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for this job, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $58,640 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- Take-home figures for this job 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 Alaska, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $58,145.
- The price adjustment for this job uses a statewide figure, and states are not uniform. A city and a rural county in the same state can differ more from each other than two states do, so treat the real-terms comparison as a direction rather than a precise answer — Florida anchors the bottom at $41,439. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- All wage figures for heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $58,640. Within-state dispersion typically exceeds between-state dispersion in this data, so an individual's expected wage is determined more by experience, sector and employer than by the state comparisons presented here.
- Take-home calculations for heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers 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 $58,145, in Alaska. 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 figures for heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers deflate take-home by a statewide regional price parity, which conceals substantial intra-state variation — metropolitan and non-metropolitan price levels within one state frequently differ by more than two states differ from each other. The wage and price series also carry different reference periods, as each is published on its own schedule, so the adjustment is directionally sound rather than precisely dated.