Paving, Surfacing, and Tamping Equipment Operators
What the pay figures show
- For once the obvious answer is right. Hawaii pays this job best, at $111,360. It keeps that lead after tax. It keeps it after local prices too — $73,798 in comparable money. Most jobs are not this tidy.
- The nominal leader for paving, surfacing, and tamping equipment operators is also the real leader: Hawaii at $111,360, holding through tax and through price deflation to $73,798. Both adjustments leave the ordering at the top intact, which indicates a wage premium large enough to dominate the state's tax burden and price level rather than merely offset them.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$53,340
People doing it
41,820
Highest paid
$111,360
HI
Best off, really
$73,798
HI, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$38,230
Highest tenth
$92,230
Lowest, really
$34,991
MS
States with data
50
National average
$59,000
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
108.61%
HI, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Where you do this job matters enormously. The best state pays roughly twice what the worst does. Prices alone cannot explain a gap that size. Level everything out and the range still runs $34,991 to $73,798.
- Just 41,820 Americans work in this job. Small fields move around more from year to year.
- This job is not published everywhere — 50 jurisdictions have a figure, with $53,340 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. Hawaii tops the ones that are.
- Geographic dispersion in paving, surfacing, and tamping equipment operators is unusually wide: the top state's median is approximately double the bottom's, a spread that price differentials cannot account for. The real-terms range, after tax and price deflation, still runs $34,991 to $73,798 — so the variation reflects genuine differences in local labor markets rather than a nominal illusion.
- 41,820 are employed nationally in paving, surfacing, and tamping equipment operators — a small occupation, where the state spread above is more sensitive to sample composition than it would be in a large one.
- 50 jurisdictions carry a published median for paving, surfacing, and tamping equipment 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: Paving, Surfacing, and Tamping Equipment Operators
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $38,230 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $53,340 |
| Top tenth earn over | $92,230 |
| This salary | $53,340 |
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 Paving, Surfacing, and Tamping Equipment Operators
The national median for this job
$53,340around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $38,230 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $53,340 |
| Top tenth | $92,230 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Paving, Surfacing, and Tamping Equipment Operators, state by state
The national median for this job
50states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Mississippi · $37,030 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Hawaii · $111,360 |
| Spread | $74,330 |
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 | $47,060 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $48,428 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| HI | $111,360 | $80,152 | $73,798 |
| WA | $90,530 | $72,518 | $66,799 |
| AK | $83,520 | $67,586 | $66,447 |
| ID | $73,210 | $57,306 | $62,681 |
| DC | $91,280 | $68,255 | $61,600 |
| MO | $69,400 | $55,328 | $60,296 |
| WI | $69,020 | $54,743 | $58,802 |
| CT | $77,480 | $59,826 | $57,697 |
| IL | $73,060 | $56,756 | $57,413 |
| SD | $60,140 | $50,502 | $57,327 |
| CA | $83,130 | $63,673 | $56,557 |
| IA | $61,110 | $49,572 | $55,845 |
| MN | $68,180 | $53,682 | $54,545 |
| OH | $60,280 | $49,674 | $54,104 |
| WY | $58,080 | $48,847 | $53,768 |
| RI | $63,060 | $50,904 | $50,195 |
| MT | $55,920 | $45,240 | $50,131 |
| NH | $62,080 | $52,061 | $49,420 |
| CO | $58,810 | $47,555 | $46,906 |
| ME | $57,020 | $45,467 | $46,826 |
| PA | $56,010 | $45,465 | $46,630 |
| WV | $51,230 | $41,847 | $46,615 |
| MD | $60,530 | $48,304 | $46,462 |
| MI | $54,220 | $43,692 | $46,390 |
| NY | $62,760 | $49,816 | $46,286 |
| VT | $54,830 | $44,655 | $46,210 |
| OR | $63,310 | $48,060 | $45,894 |
| LA | $48,450 | $40,042 | $45,325 |
| NV | $51,400 | $43,480 | $44,834 |
| MA | $60,950 | $48,426 | $44,740 |
| IN | $50,380 | $41,204 | $44,697 |
| KS | $49,070 | $39,158 | $43,526 |
| DE | $54,020 | $43,154 | $43,479 |
| OK | $46,760 | $38,148 | $43,210 |
| AZ | $52,140 | $43,173 | $42,702 |
| NM | $45,880 | $38,039 | $42,085 |
| AR | $44,010 | $36,372 | $42,045 |
| SC | $46,950 | $39,107 | $41,971 |
| NC | $47,820 | $39,204 | $41,645 |
| NE | $45,760 | $37,570 | $41,570 |
| UT | $48,860 | $39,265 | $41,330 |
| KY | $45,660 | $37,387 | $41,327 |
| TX | $47,060 | $39,993 | $41,155 |
| TN | $42,510 | $36,337 | $39,277 |
| GA | $46,100 | $37,520 | $38,801 |
| VA | $48,060 | $38,793 | $38,505 |
| FL | $46,840 | $39,816 | $38,487 |
| NJ | $50,500 | $41,514 | $38,128 |
| AL | $41,880 | $34,044 | $37,839 |
| MS | $37,030 | $30,544 | $34,991 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for this job as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $53,340, which means half of everyone doing this work earns less than that. Where you land depends on how long you have done it, who you do it for, and which city you do it in.
- 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 Hawaii, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $80,152.
- Levelling out prices for this job is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — Mississippi sits at the bottom on $34,991.
- These are distribution medians for paving, surfacing, and tamping equipment operators, with a national value of $53,340. They describe a midpoint rather than an expected offer, and the within-occupation spread — visible in the tenth and ninetieth percentile figures — is wide enough that a state-level median is a weak predictor for any individual worker.
- Take-home calculations for paving, surfacing, and tamping equipment 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 $80,152, in Hawaii. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- The price deflation applied to paving, surfacing, and tamping equipment operators uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is Mississippi at $34,991. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Mississippi anchors the bottom at $34,991 — and the two source series are dated independently.