Bus Drivers, Transit and Intercity

A $59,050 midpoint puts Bus Drivers, Transit and Intercity $9,030 above the $50,020 typical American job — a 18% premium paid for the training, the licence or the conditions. It is not free money and it disappears the moment you stop meeting the requirement.

National employment is 159,240. At that scale hiring is continuous, the market rate is well established, and your leverage comes from being credibly willing to go somewhere else.

This work suits people who want to be left alone to do the job and are judged on whether the load arrived on time and intact.

How long it takes to become one of the 159,240 people doing this is not something we have a source for. BLS counts and pays them; it does not record how they got there, and we would rather say so than guess.

The middle half runs $47,530 to $70,700 — $1,930 a month between the quarters, a 1.5x ratio. Spreads this narrow are usually set by a grade or a scale, so the negotiation you are imagining probably is not available.

At $47,530, or $22.85 an hour, the bottom quarter of this work lands within $2,490 of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — an unusually solid floor.

Avoid it if long periods alone, irregular sleep or time away from home are dealbreakers.

There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 159,240 people employed as Bus Drivers, Transit and Intercity; it did not count the people who trained for it and are doing something else, and a rate built without that denominator would be a number we made up.

$47,530 to $70,700 is a 1.5x range. Ranges this tight usually mean the employer set is homogeneous — the same kind of organisation paying the same kind of scale — so the lever you have is geography rather than employer.

The middle half of this field earns between $47,530 and $70,700. That is $23,170 of range, with $59,050 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.

The 75th percentile is $70,700. Reaching it from the $59,050 midpoint is $11,650 a year; reaching it from the $47,530 that the bottom quarter of Bus Drivers, Transit and Intercity earn is $23,170.

$59,050 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $11,520 above the bottom quarter, $11,650 below the top one. A symmetric distribution like this is the case where the median genuinely does describe the typical person.

Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $28.38 at the midpoint for Bus Drivers, Transit and Intercity, $22.85 at the 25th percentile and $33.99 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.