Occupation / job
Crossing Guards and Flaggers
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
Crossing Guards and Flaggers pays $38,100 where the typical American job pays $50,020 — $11,920 a year short, or $5.73 an hour. That is a liveable wage in a cheap state and a difficult one in an expensive city, and nothing about the national figure tells you which you would be in.
94,360 people are employed as Crossing Guards and Flaggers. At that size there is a real ladder and enough churn that experience can be sold to a competitor rather than only accumulated where you are.
These roles suit people who can be reliably present and observant for a whole shift, in work where nothing happening is the intended outcome.
How long it takes to become one of the 94,360 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
Between $34,430 and $47,540 there is $13,110, a ratio of 1.4x. Tight distributions are predictable, and predictable cuts both ways: little risk of being badly underpaid, little prospect of doing much better.
Under $34,430 is where a quarter of this field sits, $15,590 beneath the $50,020 a typical American job pays. The risk in Crossing Guards and Flaggers is not the average outcome, it is how long you might spend in the bottom quarter before leaving it.
Avoid it if long, uneventful shifts would be hard to stay sharp through — that is the actual difficulty of the job.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 94,360 is a headcount of the employed, which is a numerator without a denominator — everyone who qualified and never got hired is missing from it, and we will not estimate them to complete a percentage.
What the spread tells you
Top quarter to bottom quarter is 1.4x. In a band that narrow, $38,100 is a genuinely representative number for Crossing Guards and Flaggers and the main variable left is where you live.
Put in money rather than ratios: $34,430 at the 25th percentile, $38,100 at the midpoint, $47,540 at the 75th. $13,110 separates the quarter of Crossing Guards and Flaggers at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Between $34,430 and $47,540 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $38,100. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $9,440; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $13,110.
The upper half of the middle range — $38,100 to $47,540, or $9,440 — is far longer than the lower half at $3,670. In a shape like this an average would flatter Crossing Guards and Flaggers considerably, and would describe nobody.
Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $18.31 at the midpoint for Crossing Guards and Flaggers, $16.55 at the 25th percentile and $22.85 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $38,100 figure is what employers pay employees. It is before tax and before deductions, it excludes the self-employed entirely, and it says nothing about anyone who does this work on their own account.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $38,100 because we have no verified record of unpaid hours or out-of-pocket costs for this work, and we would rather convert honestly than adjust invented ones.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else