Occupation / job
Transit and Railroad Police
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
$90,230 against a $50,020 national midpoint is 80% more, or $19.33 an hour. Almost nothing pays this much more without a long, expensive or restricted route in — read that route before reading the number again.
Employment as Transit and Railroad Police stands at 4,390. That is small enough that your local market may have a dozen posts in total; mobility will matter more to your earnings than seniority does.
Law enforcement suits people who can be the visible authority in a hostile moment and then write it up accurately afterwards, knowing the record will be read adversarially.
We carry no verified training length for Transit and Railroad Police — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
The quarters sit at $68,990 and $119,290 — 1.7x, or $4,191 a month apart. At that width the occupation contains genuinely different jobs, and which one you are being offered matters more than the title does.
At $68,990, or $33.16 an hour, the 25th percentile sits $18,970 above the $50,020 the typical American job pays. Occupations with floors this high almost always have a requirement holding them there.
Avoid it if you could not accept that your worst thirty seconds may be reviewed for years afterwards.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 4,390 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
A ratio of 1.7x — $68,990 to $119,290 — is wide enough that specialising inside Transit and Railroad Police pays measurably. $90,230 is the middle of a range you can move within.
The middle half of this field earns between $68,990 and $119,290. That is $50,300 of range, with $90,230 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
The 75th percentile is $119,290. Reaching it from the $90,230 midpoint is $29,060 a year; reaching it from the $68,990 that the bottom quarter of Transit and Railroad Police earn is $50,300.
The climb from $90,230 to $119,290 is $29,060, against $21,240 down to $68,990. Rather more of the range sits above the midpoint than below it, so the realistic upside in Transit and Railroad Police is larger than the realistic downside.
Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $43.37 at the midpoint for Transit and Railroad Police, $33.16 at the 25th percentile and $57.35 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.
What these figures are, and what they are not
This is payroll data: it comes from employers, about people they employ. Anyone doing the work of Transit and Railroad Police for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $90,230 describes them.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $90,230 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