Understanding a Pay Stub from the Trucking Industry

It all really depends on how your company breaks down your paychecks. For us with orientation, it was 5 days. At the end of 5 days I was immediately given 250 bucks, which showed up on my paycheck as a driver advance. The next week the other 250 showed up as orientation pay. You may notice you can have tons of rows for different pay. Some of mine are, Driver advances, trainee pay, layover, recruitment pay, bonus miles pay, miles driven, load drop, extra load stop and hours worked,

In the future you will take your miles driven pay and any other bonuses added, like maybe drop pay or extra stop pay, and divide by the hours worked for the week and that will give you your hourly rate. For training or orientation it should be a flat rate per day or week pay.

Now as for the rest. The skills portion is pretty simple and most of it you learn along the way. As long as you can be safe and remember at all times you are driving a truck and not some Nascar 4 wheeler you will be fine. They told me a first year driver is safer than a 1 year driver, so just don't ever get too comfortable behind the wheel and always have respect for the laws of friction.

As for personality traita, well you don't need much. Many people are rude and certain locations you will visit you will encounter racism no matter your ethnicity. Just be polite and hold decent ethics. It goes a long way at most shippers. There have been many times I bite my tounge and the guy next to me didn't and what do you know, loaded and out the door before him, everytime.

Just to be quick about the financial aspect. You can start driving with nothing, literally nothing and make a solid career out of it. I worked week to week before starting cdl school and it broke me with two loans from the bank just to make the career switch but after a few months I had all that paid off as well as a few luxurious amenities for the truck, ie tv, ps4, fridge, cpu. Well worth the switch, I love my job and money is just being saved for now.

 

If you're strictly concerned about hourly pay for orientation, don't worry about it. It's minimal at best but they are not technically employed during orientation, so they get whatever the prospective employer decides to offer.

If you're talking about pay once on a "normal" work schedule, few drivers get paid strictly by the hour, so this may turn out to be an exercise in frustration.

 

I'm confused, if he's trying to verify employment, the presence of a pay stub should be enough by itself.

As for $/hr. It really doesn't apply to trucking at all. (See the numerous threads here)

Some companies pay hourly, most pay per mile, a few pay a percentage of the load, some companies have bonuses, pay for certain duties (stop pay, drop & hook pay, etc).

Some people can make six figures almost immediately, (unlikely but not unheard of) others struggle to make less than they'd make at minimum wage in twice the hours.