North Dakota 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
$60,910
Rank 11 of 51. May 2025.
Hourly median
$29.29
As BLS reports it, on a 2,080 hour year.
Bottom tenth
$47,990
A tenth of drivers earn less.
Top tenth
$83,330
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 North Dakota is above it by $2,140.
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 | $47,990 | 79% |
| 25th | $52,310 | 86% |
| Median | $60,910 | 100% |
| 75th | $67,110 | 110% |
| 90th | $83,330 | 137% |
The top tenth in North Dakota earns 1.74 times what the bottom tenth does, a gap of $35,340 a year between two people doing what is nominally the same job.
Drivers employed
11,870
27.6 of every 1,000 jobs in the state.
Concentration
2.08x
Driving work is 2.08 times as common here as it is nationally.
For scale: the 3,784 active interstate carriers based in North Dakota report 26,864 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.