Rhode Island 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
$60,190
Rank 20 of 51. May 2025.
Hourly median
$28.94
As BLS reports it, on a 2,080 hour year.
Bottom tenth
$45,600
A tenth of drivers earn less.
Top tenth
$75,120
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 Rhode Island is above it by $1,420.
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 | $45,600 | 76% |
| 25th | $50,330 | 84% |
| Median | $60,190 | 100% |
| 75th | $64,250 | 107% |
| 90th | $75,120 | 125% |
The top tenth in Rhode Island earns 1.65 times what the bottom tenth does, a gap of $29,520 a year between two people doing what is nominally the same job.
Drivers employed
3,620
7.2 of every 1,000 jobs in the state.
Concentration
0.55x
Driving is a smaller share of employment here than it is nationally.
For scale: the 2,937 active interstate carriers based in Rhode Island report 15,982 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.