Swift team drivers and mentor pay.

@FerrissWheel is a flatbed mentor. he might know the current mentor pay and how long you have to be with swift b4 becoming a mentor. @Lepton1 is a former dry van mentor and he might chime in ( he no longer works for swift).

 

Team pay, like solo pay can vary according to available freight and timing of making the accounting cutoff. When I drove team at Swift it was on a dedicated coast to coast run, starting every Monday morning in LA and running to the east coast (from Boston to Miami) and back by Saturday morning to do a 34 reset. That was fairly consistent pay at around $1300 gross on average. Teaming without a dedicated gig will mean sometimes doing short hops and sitting to position for a long haul.

During the year I mentored I did $72K gross. I tested out 10 trainees, so that's pretty much running a trainee through their 200 hours behind the wheel (averaged about 28 days from the time they got in my truck), then taking home time for a few days before the next trainee.

If you are interested in Swift and want to maximize your earnings, consider the flatbed division. You get paid more per mile, plus tarp pay. It's hard to get a flatbed mentor, they don't have nearly enough to handle the demand.

 

That's often the case with trucking in general, if you have to put the trailer in a dock. Wait for a dock to open, wait to get loaded or unloaded, wait for them to finish making whatever needs to be loaded, etc. You do get paid detention time after two hours.

The good news is that the majority of Swift loads are "drop and hook", meaning you drop a loaded trailer and hook to an empty trailer or vice versa. Sometimes finding an empty trailer is a big problem.

By comparison flatbed in my experience has a lot less waiting time for the customers I serve. Customers need what's on your deck and it's often a struggle to get straps and chains off the load ahead of the forklift or crane. Last night was pretty typical, one hour to get the load off AND get a load put back on the deck going back to the shipper.

 

Go to Covenant and train Husband/Wife teams .

.72 cpm per mile with Lots of fedex/ups/conway/RL/etc + a bonus when the students pass the final test .

My trainer was making over $100k per year with them 5 years ago training one person at a time . Real numbers

 

I brought in 74k last year , very similar to @Lepton1.

Part of the year as reefer, the final quarter as flat. There were a few months I took no one. But early in the year I ran it hard, and later in the year I eased off and did simply more super solo.

But they pay is very simply your normal pay, and you get it whenever the student drives. I'm a level 2 mentor, so I get an additional CPM bonus, with my driver status bonus.

Flatbed does get more than dry van per mile. And lepton hit the nail on the head with the unload. Often it'll take more time to put your equipment up than for the customer to unload.



Current pay for flatbed. Not the best, not the worst. But better than either van division.

As for making money as a pure team, it often comes down to the team being efficient and gaming the system. Need a load call the planners. I was once waiting for a load, I called a flatbed customer service rep, and had a load 5 minutes later. There weren't any planners in the office at that moment, but flatbed CSRs actually get the loads for the fleet, and they can hand them out too.

 

I've heard that the flatbed division is pretty well run. Every Swift flatbedder I met was more than happy with their work load, if anything they were looking for opportunities to take a break.

 

I understand that the Swift flatbed division is around 900 trucks, with only 20 flatbed mentor/trainers. Seems like if any experienced flatbed driver wants to become a trainer at Swift they will be in demand.