When I was first considering getting my CDL so that I could become a local truck driver, I wanted to make sure that it was going to be worth it. I had many questions that I needed to answer but the most important one was, how much do local truck drivers make?
Local truck drivers make between $19 – $26 per hour, $800 – $1050 per week, and $40,00 – $55,000 per year, depending on which state you live in. This is for what are considered your normal local driving jobs with little to no experience. With more experience or a hazmat certification you can make even more money.
There is so much information online, it is hard to tell what exactly local truck drivers make. There are three different classes of a CDL with each class leading to different types of jobs that pay different.
There are different salary studies, mostly done by different job websites that have different results. So, first let’s look at what some of the different job websites had to say about how much local truck drivers make.
ZipRecruiter.com
ZipRecruiter is just like any other job board for the most part. I am going to talk about what they had to say about local truck driver pay because I really like that their article was very recent, and they had a table separating what each truck driver made by state.
Even after separating local truck drivers’ salaries by state, they then further broke it down to what local truck drivers made per hour per week, and per year.
They then took all of this information and sorted it with the highest paying state at the top of the list in chronological order with the lowest paying state at the bottom.
Here is the table:
| State | Annual Salary | Monthly Pay | Weekly Pay | Hourly Wage |
| Wyoming | $55,521 | $4,627 | $1,068 | $26.69 |
| Massachusetts | $52,837 | $4,403 | $1,016 | $25.40 |
| Montana | $52,318 | $4,360 | $1,006 | $25.15 |
| Arizona | $51,779 | $4,315 | $996 | $24.89 |
| Hawaii | $51,736 | $4,311 | $995 | $24.87 |
| Indiana | $51,447 | $4,287 | $989 | $24.73 |
| New Jersey | $51,339 | $4,278 | $987 | $24.68 |
| Connecticut | $50,879 | $4,240 | $978 | $24.46 |
| Washington | $50,820 | $4,235 | $977 | $24.43 |
| New York | $50,733 | $4,228 | $976 | $24.39 |
| Georgia | $49,949 | $4,162 | $961 | $24.01 |
| Rhode Island | $49,714 | $4,143 | $956 | $23.90 |
| Wisconsin | $49,335 | $4,111 | $949 | $23.72 |
| Tennessee | $49,206 | $4,100 | $946 | $23.66 |
| Minnesota | $49,099 | $4,092 | $944 | $23.61 |
| Alaska | $49,096 | $4,091 | $944 | $23.60 |
| New Hampshire | $48,955 | $4,080 | $941 | $23.54 |
| North Dakota | $48,936 | $4,078 | $941 | $23.53 |
| Ohio | $48,845 | $4,070 | $939 | $23.48 |
| Alabama | $48,782 | $4,065 | $938 | $23.45 |
| Nevada | $48,709 | $4,059 | $937 | $23.42 |
| Maryland | $48,220 | $4,018 | $927 | $23.18 |
| Utah | $47,973 | $3,998 | $923 | $23.06 |
| Louisiana | $47,617 | $3,968 | $916 | $22.89 |
| South Dakota | $47,507 | $3,959 | $914 | $22.84 |
| Nebraska | $47,409 | $3,951 | $912 | $22.79 |
| Florida | $47,076 | $3,923 | $905 | $22.63 |
| New Mexico | $46,909 | $3,909 | $902 | $22.55 |
| Oregon | $46,849 | $3,904 | $901 | $22.52 |
| Virginia | $46,788 | $3,899 | $900 | $22.49 |
| Iowa | $46,556 | $3,880 | $895 | $22.38 |
| Kentucky | $46,490 | $3,874 | $894 | $22.35 |
| Kentucky | $46,490 | $3,874 | $894 | $22.35 |
| Kansas | $46,261 | $3,855 | $890 | $22.24 |
| California | $46,073 | $3,839 | $886 | $22.15 |
| Vermont | $46,026 | $3,835 | $885 | $22.13 |
| South Carolina | $45,385 | $3,782 | $873 | $21.82 |
| Colorado | $45,279 | $3,773 | $871 | $21.77 |
| Delaware | $45,078 | $3,756 | $867 | $21.67 |
| West Virginia | $44,100 | $3,675 | $848 | $21.20 |
| Oklahoma | $44,062 | $3,672 | $847 | $21.18 |
| Pennsylvania | $43,887 | $3,657 | $844 | $21.10 |
| Mississippi | $43,349 | $3,612 | $834 | $20.84 |
| Idaho | $43,140 | $3,595 | $830 | $20.74 |
| Maine | $42,954 | $3,580 | $826 | $20.65 |
| Arkansas | $42,570 | $3,547 | $819 | $20.47 |
| Michigan | $42,478 | $3,540 | $817 | $20.42 |
| Illinois | $42,338 | $3,528 | $814 | $20.35 |
| Texas | $41,646 | $3,470 | $801 | $20.02 |
| Missouri | $41,520 | $3,460 | $798 | $19.96 |
| North Carolina | $38,674 | $3,223 | $744 | $18.59 |
It doesn’t get any better than that folks. I did a little digging and found out that ZipRecruiter has their employment statistics put together by ADP employment data. ADP is a national research institute so you can take the data from the table above to the bank, it is definitely trustworthy.
ADP’s website states:
The mission of the ADP Research Institute is to generate data-driven discoveries about the world of work and derive reliable economic indicators from these insights. We offer these findings to the world at large as our unique contribution to making the world of work better and more productive, and to bring greater awareness to the economy at large.
If you click on some of their options, these are their yearly and hourly figures:
$51,355/year
$25/hour
So, take a good look at the table above and find your state if you want to know what local truck drivers make.
Glassdoor.com
When I clicked on their article, it didn’t have much to say. There was just a bar graph saying that local truck drivers averaged $55,101 per year. You could filter the results by location, but it really meant the city that you lived in and when I did it said no current results for my city or state.
I love glassdoor because they are great for finding a job but when you research stuff like salaries they’re not so great.
Indeed.com
Indeed.com had skewed results as well when I clicked on their google result for: how much do local truck drivers make? It just says that the average base salary for a local truck driver is $25.10 per hour. If you click on the little question mark symbol, it says the stats are based off salaries reported anonymously to indeed from actual employees.
While it does make since to go by what actual employees report, I will certainly go with the table put together by ziprecruiter since they had such an in-depth study done by a research firm.
Hopefully, I never have to look for another job again but when I was looking for a CDL job, indeed was my favorite job site to use. It is way easier to sort the results than the others and it seems to have more employee reviews of the companies than the other job sites.
Payscale.com
The next website down in google search results, payscale.com seems like a legitimate site. They operate off of tons and tons of surveys. Let’s look at some of their stats:
$19.65 per Hr.
$59,000 per year.
It seems legitimate, $19.65 an hour on average seems about par for where I live in Wyoming even though the ziprecruiter stats show a lot higher at $25 per hour.
I actually did the math on ziprecruiters tabel though and the hourly wage would be closer too $22.00 per hour which sounds reasonable.
Zippia.com
Zippia says the national average for local truck drivers is $43,000 per year.
This is what they had to say about their stats:
We analyzed 2,746 local truck driver resumes along with a trove of other data to determine the demographics for local truck drivers. Just to be clear, by demographics we mean the study of population-based factors like age, race and sex. On top of scouring through resumes, we also took note of job proposals from employers and Census Bureau data. And guess what? We found some pretty interesting information.
My Take on The Stats
All of these stats can get pretty confusing when you do a google search and go off the results. However, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. If the website is legitimate, they will explain how they got their results.
My opinion is the results are not going to be %100 accurate but we can get a rough picture. I like the ziprecruiter results and payscale because they are based on actual studies done nationwide and not just reported salaries to a job site like the stats on indeed.com.
So, with that being said if I put the stats for ziprecruiter and payscale together we can say that the national average for a local truck driver is $19.65 – around $22.50 per hour. This should be anywhere between $52,00 and $59,000 per year depending on how much overtime you get for each company.
There are a lot of variables that go into how much local truck drivers get paid because there are so many different types of jobs available in local truck driving.
There are jobs where you take Walmart loads from the distribution center to various Walmart’s and just sit in the truck all shift.
There are food service delivery jobs where most days you spend more time exercising by taking the food in than you do driving.
There are hazmat jobs where you haul fuel or oil field jobs where you haul crude oil. Some of these hazmat jobs are local and pay way more than the national average.
Then you would have to further divide the results between class A, class B and class C cdl jobs which offer different pay scales. A lot of class B cdl jobs don’t require pulling a trailer so they will not pay as much as a class A job. The same with class C jobs where you are usually hauling 16 passengers or more and are mainly jobs driving a bus, so is it really considered a truck? Yes, I would say so…
Class B jobs involve box trucks and dump trucks so they would be considered local truck driving jobs.
Conclusion
Based on the results and my experience, with any of the class A, B, or C cdl’s you can make anywhere from $16 – $25 an hour starting out. If you get 10 hours of overtime per week this works out too around $42,240 – $66,000 gross pay per year. Again, that is some math I did based on the hourly pay with 10 hours of overtime per week. That is 50 hours per week.
There are some jobs that try to keep you as close to 40 hours per week as they can and some jobs that let you run wild with overtime trying to max it out. You can only work 60 hrs. over 7 days straight and 70 hrs. over 8 days straight. These are the cdl rules which say you can only be ‘on duty’ for 14 hours each day and can only ‘drive’ for 11 hours each day. To reset the 60 or 70 hours, you have to be off duty for 36 hours and then it all starts over again.
Anyways, if you are interested in CDL local driving jobs, there is a huge variety of driving jobs and pay out there, so I hope this helps.