New Jersey driver pay
What a company seat pays here. These are employed drivers in SOC 53-3032, the Class 8 seat, so this is a wage and not owner-operator revenue. What an owner-operator keeps is a different question, and the cost-per-mile page is where it gets answered.
Median
$63,570
Rank 4 of 51. May 2025.
Hourly median
$30.56
As BLS reports it, on a 2,080 hour year.
Bottom tenth
$47,950
A tenth of drivers earn less.
Top tenth
$90,310
A tenth of drivers earn more.
Against every other state
State medians run from $49,320 to $70,100. The middle of them is $58,770, and New Jersey is above it by $4,800.
The whole distribution
A median on its own tells you very little about whether a market is worth moving to. The spread does. Where the tenth and ninetieth percentiles are far apart, experience, endorsements and the right account are worth real money; where they are close, the market pays roughly the same whatever you bring to it.
| Percentile | Annual | Against the median |
|---|---|---|
| 10th | $47,950 | 75% |
| 25th | $57,400 | 90% |
| Median | $63,570 | 100% |
| 75th | $76,450 | 120% |
| 90th | $90,310 | 142% |
The top tenth in New Jersey earns 1.88 times what the bottom tenth does, a gap of $42,360 a year between two people doing what is nominally the same job.
Drivers employed
47,980
11.2 of every 1,000 jobs in the state.
Concentration
0.84x
Driving is a smaller share of employment here than it is nationally.
For scale: the 25,369 active interstate carriers based in New Jersey report 143,385 interstate drivers between them on their MCS-150 filings. That is a different count from the BLS figure and measured a different way, which is why the two are shown separately rather than reconciled into one number that would be neither.
Source: BLS OEWS, 53-3032 Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers. State estimates for May 2025. Employed drivers only; owner-operators are not in scope. Read 2026-08-21.