Occupation / job
Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
A median of $35,830 against the $50,020 all-occupation figure leaves Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment 28% behind — $14,190 across a year. Whether that is workable depends almost entirely on where you would be doing it.
380,430 people do this work. An occupation this large has a published, well-known going rate — which means less scope to be underpaid and less scope to negotiate above it.
These roles suit people who prefer to be busy physically rather than sat still, and who value being able to find the same job in any city.
How long it takes to become one of the 380,430 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.
Who should not do this
The quarters sit at $30,420 and $41,040, $885 a month apart at a ratio of 1.3x. Narrow enough that what you can expect is close to what everyone else gets.
The bottom quarter is under $30,420, $19,600 short of the $50,020 typical American job. The question worth answering before entering Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment is how long people spend in that quarter, because the median says nothing about it.
Avoid it if you need pay that rises with time served; in much of this category it does not.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 380,430 figure counts people already working as Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
A 1.3x spread means the top quarter of Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment is not doing a different job from the bottom quarter, just a slightly better-paid version of the same one. Between $30,420 and $41,040 is the whole of the negotiation.
In cash terms the middle half of Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment runs $30,420 to $41,040 — $10,620 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $35,830.
The 75th percentile is $41,040. Reaching it from the $35,830 midpoint is $5,210 a year; reaching it from the $30,420 that the bottom quarter of Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment earn is $10,620.
$5,410 down to $30,420, $5,210 up to $41,040: the midpoint of Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment is centred in its own middle half. That symmetry is why the median and the average would say much the same thing here, which is not true of most pages on this site.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment is $17.22 an hour. The quarters sit at $14.62 and $19.73, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment. The self-employed are excluded, so $35,830 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment, the hourly figure is $35,830 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else