Occupation / job
Industrial Truck and Tractor Operators
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
Industrial Truck and Tractor Operators pays $46,420 where the typical job pays $50,020 — $1.73 an hour apart. That is close enough to average that the interesting numbers on this page are the percentiles, not the median.
With 774,420 employed, this is one of the biggest occupations in the country. Work at this scale is always available and rarely scarce, and the wage on this page is what that combination produces.
Material moving suits people who want physical work they can start quickly, in a part of the labour market that hires continuously and across most of the country.
No verified preparation time is on file for Industrial Truck and Tractor Operators. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.
Who should not do this
Between $40,030 and $54,770 there is $14,740, 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.
Even the bottom quarter, under $40,030, lands within $9,990 of the $50,020 typical American wage. The downside of Industrial Truck and Tractor Operators is not really the money.
Avoid it if repetitive lifting would be unsustainable, or if you need pay that rises meaningfully with time served.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 774,420 figure counts people already working as Industrial Truck and Tractor Operators, 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
The quarters are $40,030 and $54,770, a ratio of 1.4x. In a distribution this narrow, the biggest single lever on your pay in Industrial Truck and Tractor Operators is the cost of living where you do it.
The middle half of this field earns between $40,030 and $54,770. That is $14,740 of range, with $46,420 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
The 75th percentile is $54,770. Reaching it from the $46,420 midpoint is $8,350 a year; reaching it from the $40,030 that the bottom quarter of Industrial Truck and Tractor Operators earn is $14,740.
The climb from $46,420 to $54,770 is $8,350; the drop to $40,030 is $6,390. A little more room above the midpoint than below it is the normal shape for Industrial Truck and Tractor Operators and for most paid work, and it is the reason the median is the honest summary rather than the average.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $19.24 at the bottom quarter, $22.31 at the midpoint, $26.33 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $46,420 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 $46,420 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