Starting Salary for Heavy Truck Drivers

Google Trend growth of Heavy Truck Drivers over an 8 year period. The search interest picked up a little before 2007 and maintained it’s strength in interest in heavy truck driving and has picked up steam lately.

Bureau of Labor Statistics information for Heavy Truck Driver salaries is classified under the category in the BLS as Heavy & Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers. The median pay for a Heavy Truck Driver was reported in 2010 as $37,770 a year coming out to about $18.16 an hour. The total number of Heavy Truck Driver positions on the job market are about 1,604,800 and the total market is expect to grow by about 21% which is faster than most careers. Heavy Truck Drivers can expect to see an additional 330,100 tractor trailer driving jobs added to the market from 2010 – 2020. Some states pay as much as $45,000 a year as you can see from the state by state truck driving salaries listed below from job listings by each state. If you’re wondering exactly what this classification of truck driver is the BLS reports that they typically, “are long-haul drivers and operate trucks with a capacity of at least 26,001 pounds per gross vehicle weight (GVW). They deliver goods over intercity routes, sometimes spanning several states.”

Listed below is information that is specific to Heavy Truck Driver job salaries that you can expect to receive in that state area. Our state by state breakdown allows you to see which state is best to get a job as a Heavy Truck Driver. The salary information provided below is off of real-world job listings for Heavy Truck Drivers and the pay offered for those jobs. We source Indeed, Simply Hired, PayScale and GlassDoor.com. The information provided by Indeed about their process for collecting salary averages is as follows: “Indeed Salary Search is based on an index of salary information extracted from over 50 million job postings from thousands of unique sources over the last 12 months. Many job descriptions don’t contain salary information, but there are enough that do to produce statistically significant median salaries for millions of keyword, job title and location combinations – in fact, most job searches you are likely to think of. As new jobs are added each day, the Indeed Salary Search index is automatically updated with fresh salary data, so the salary results are as up-to-date as they could possibly be.”