Occupation / job
Light Truck Drivers
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
$44,860 against a $50,020 all-occupation midpoint puts Light Truck Drivers $430 a month below the middle of the American labour market — close enough that the spread below matters more to your outcome than the headline does.
At 983,300 workers, Light Truck Drivers is one of the largest occupations in the country. Jobs at this scale are the labour market’s floor — always hiring, rarely bidding, and first to absorb people leaving somewhere else.
Driving suits people who are comfortable alone for long stretches and who can hold a schedule as the primary measure of whether they did the job.
We carry no verified training length for Light Truck Drivers — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
A quarter of Light Truck Drivers earn under $37,270 and a quarter over $52,310 — 1.4x, or $15,040 apart. Narrow spreads usually mean a pay schedule, which is stability bought at the price of upside.
A quarter of the field earns under $37,270 — $12,750 below the $50,020 the typical American job pays. That is the number to plan on for a first year, not the midpoint.
Avoid it if long periods alone, irregular sleep or time away from home are dealbreakers.
There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 983,300 people employed as Light Truck Drivers; it did not count the people who trained for it and are doing something else, and a rate built without that denominator would be a number we made up.
What the spread tells you
Top quarter to bottom quarter is 1.4x. In a band that narrow, $44,860 is a genuinely representative number for Light Truck Drivers and the main variable left is where you live.
Put in money rather than ratios: $37,270 at the 25th percentile, $44,860 at the midpoint, $52,310 at the 75th. $15,040 separates the quarter of Light Truck Drivers at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Between $37,270 and $52,310 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $44,860. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $7,450; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $15,040.
$7,590 down to $37,270, $7,450 up to $52,310: the midpoint of Light Truck Drivers 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.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $17.91 at the bottom quarter, $21.56 at the midpoint, $25.14 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
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Light Truck Drivers. The self-employed are excluded, so $44,860 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
The hourly number on this page is $44,860 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Light Truck Drivers, so it is arithmetic rather than an effective rate.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else