Occupation / job
School Bus Monitors
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
At a $35,100 midpoint, School Bus Monitors sits 30% under the $50,020 national figure. The shortfall is $1,243 a month, which is roughly the size of a rent difference between metros — worth checking before the job is the thing you blame.
78,420 people are employed as School Bus Monitors. At that scale every large metro has a real market, and the difference between a good year and a bad one is usually which employer you are at rather than whether anyone is hiring.
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 78,420 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
From $31,760 to $37,760 is only $6,000 — a 1.2x ratio. If your reason for considering School Bus Monitors is that you would be good at it, note that the data shows very little money attached to being good at it.
Under $31,760 is where a quarter of this field sits, $18,260 beneath the $50,020 a typical American job pays. The risk in School Bus Monitors 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. 78,420 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
Only 1.2x separates $31,760 from $37,760. That is a scale, not a market: what you are offered in School Bus Monitors will be very close to $35,100 regardless of what you bring to it.
In cash terms the middle half of School Bus Monitors runs $31,760 to $37,760 — $6,000 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $35,100.
The 75th percentile is $37,760. Reaching it from the $35,100 midpoint is $2,660 a year; reaching it from the $31,760 that the bottom quarter of School Bus Monitors earn is $6,000.
There is $3,340 between $31,760 and $35,100, and $2,660 between $35,100 and $37,760. The lower half of the range is marginally the longer one — worth knowing if you would be entering School Bus Monitors at the bottom of it.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $15.26 at the bottom quarter, $16.87 at the midpoint, $18.15 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 $35,100 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.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for School Bus Monitors, the hourly figure is $35,100 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else