Commercial driver's licence (CDL)

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. Holders on a date against employment in a period — 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.

Four years after completing — a figure for the programme code, not for this job alone

Of 9,948 people who completed Ground transportation (truck and bus driving), undergraduate certificate or diploma and were no longer studying four years later, 834 had no earnings on record at all — 8.4%. The ones who were working earned a median of $52,118, with the middle half between $28,154 and $74,052.

“No earnings on record” is not “unemployed”. The measure is the absence of any wage record and any positive self-employment income for the whole year. Nobody was asked whether they wanted work, so the count holds people who left the workforce by choice — raising children, caring, travelling, living on someone else's income, moving abroad — alongside everyone who wanted a job and had none. Nobody publishes the split and we will not guess it. What it does establish is how many people finished this training and were earning nothing from it or from anything else four years on, which is exactly what the pay figure above cannot tell you.

And this figure is not specific to this job. The federal government publishes programme outcomes at four-digit granularity and no finer, and this credential's programmes share their code with others. So the figure describes everyone who completed anything under that code at this level, not only the people who went on to do this work.

What that programme code covers: CIP 49.02 is ground transportation: truck and bus driving, and also flagging and traffic control. Most completions are truck driving. One caveat matters more here than anywhere else on this page — this covers only the driving schools that take federal student aid, and most CDL training is paid in cash or funded by a carrier and never appears in federal data at all.

This covers only driving schools inside the federal student-aid system, which is a small and probably unrepresentative slice of CDL training — the same limitation as the cost figure above, and for the same reason.

Who is in the cohort: completers who received federal student aid — roughly half of US undergraduates, and the other half are not measured here. People who went on to further study are in neither column. The Department suppresses institutions with cohorts too small to publish and adds statistical noise to the rest, so this is a sum over the institutions large enough to report: 74 of them, recovering 80.4% of the Department's own national count for this programme. Dropping the smallest reporting programmes moves the rate by 0.1 percentage points.

Source: US Department of Education, College Scorecard, Field of Study data, 2026 — release of 10 June 2026; measured four years after completion · view · the same figure for every programme we can publish