Credential
Commercial driver's licence (CDL)
Weeks rather than years, a few thousand dollars rather than tens of thousands, and it is the cheapest credential on this site that leads to work paying above the typical US job.
What it costs to get. The middle half of the range — a quarter of people pay less, a quarter pay more.
No single training length. What it takes is set state by state or programme by programme; the note below says what we could establish.
Months of the pay premium needed to cover that cost. Not months until you are ahead overall — the training time above comes first.
Source: US Department of Education, College Scorecard, Field of Study data, 2026 · view
What that cost figure is, and what it is not
This figure covers only the truck-driving schools that take federal student aid — 37 institutions reported one — and that is a small and probably unrepresentative slice of CDL training. Most CDL training is either paid for in cash at a private school or funded by a carrier in exchange for a work commitment, and neither appears in federal data at all. That range is median cumulative FEDERAL LOAN DEBT at completion, not a tuition sticker price and not total cost. It is what completers actually borrowed, so it excludes grants, savings, family money, employer funding and living costs — which makes it a FLOOR on what the credential costs, never a ceiling. The low and high figures are the 25th and 75th percentiles across the institutions that report a figure for this programme, so a quarter of institutions sit below the low end. College Scorecard pools two award years into each figure; the release used here is dated 10 June 2026.
There is no national training length. Federal Entry-Level Driver Training rules set a curriculum but no minimum hours, so programmes run from about three weeks to a few months. Carrier-sponsored training is usually at the short end and comes with a contract that is expensive to break.
The licence renews with your state driving licence, and a DOT medical certificate has to stay current alongside it.
How many people hold this, and how many are working in the field
The number the pay figure leaves out
Of the 3,800,000 active interstate commercial driver's licence holders counted in 2024, federal employment records account for 2,062,040 working in the occupations it is for — 54.3%. That leaves 1,737,960 holders it does not account for.
That gap is an upper bound, not an unemployment rate. Holding a credential is not the same as looking for work with it. The gap contains everyone who moved into management, teaching, sales, inspection or a related job that federal data files under a different occupation; everyone who retired or left without surrendering the credential; everyone working part time, agency or self-employed in a way the employment survey does not capture; and everyone holding it as a second string to another job. So the gap is the CEILING on how many trained people are not working in this field — the real figure is lower, and it is not a count of anyone who is unemployed. What the pair does establish is the size of the pool the published pay figure is silent about, which is the thing no pay site shows you.
Both sides are standing counts. The credential figure is a stock — everyone holding it on the date it was counted — and the employment figure is a stock too, everyone employed in the reference period. They are the same kind of quantity, which is the only reason the two may be divided at all.
What that count includes: Drivers holding a commercial driver's licence and authorised to drive across state lines, as counted by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. It EXCLUDES intrastate-only CDL holders, whom FMCSA counted separately at 2.1 million in a December 2023 snapshot; FMCSA publishes no combined total, so we do not add them. FMCSA states the figure to two significant figures and we carry it at that precision rather than inventing more.
Denominator: active interstate commercial driver's licence holders = 3,800,000 (Standing count of people holding the credential, FMCSA figure for 2024) · FMCSA, Non-Domiciled Commercial Driver's Licenses and Commercial Learner's Permits, 90 FR 46520 (29 September 2025) · view
One structural caveat pushes the gap wider than it really is: federal employment data counts employees, not the self-employed, so owner-operators driving their own trucks are largely missing from the employed side. They hold CDLs and they are working. The unaccounted-for holders below therefore overstate the number of licensed drivers not driving, by an amount nobody publishes.
What it lets you do
The pay belongs to the job, not to the credential. These are the occupations this qualifies you for, with what BLS records people already doing them earn.
| Job | Is it required? | Median | Employed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers | Legally required to hold the job | $58,640 | 2,062,040 |
Median pay and employment: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025.
Does it pay for itself?
The job this unlocks pays a median of $58,640. The employment-weighted median across every occupation we publish is $50,020, so the premium for holding this is about $8,620 a year before tax. At that premium the cost above is covered in the number of months shown.
Read that as a comparison to an average job, not to your job. We do not know what you earn now, so we do not use it. The baseline is the employment-weighted median across all the occupations on this site — the midpoint American worker. If you already earn more than that, the payback is longer than shown; if you earn less, shorter. The figure also ignores the months of training, during which most people earn less or nothing, and it ignores interest on anything borrowed.
And it assumes you get the job. Every payback figure on this site is conditional on being hired into the work. That is the assumption the credential-holder count above exists to test, and it is the assumption every other pay site makes silently.
What you need before you start
- A valid driving licence and a clean enough record
- A DOT medical certificate
- Age 21 for interstate driving
Do not do this if
- you cannot pass a DOT physical or a drug and alcohol test
- you cannot be away from home for days or weeks at a time
- you have disqualifying convictions — the federal Clearinghouse lists over 200,000 CDL holders in prohibited status
All credentials, by payback period · How this is calculated · Look up something else