How much did truckers earn in past decades? 1990s? 1980s? 1970s?

The sad thing about this is sure your base cpm pay has increased dramatically but your gross take home really hasn't changed.
I started in 99 maybe at .23 cents a mile or so, now I'm making .60 cents and my take home still only 1000 a week lol. But I'm lazy and only work 5 days a week lol

 

So, I started driving in late '88, for a big carrier. Made $0.17/mile at first. By 1990, I was making $.019/mile, but when I switched to 'Canadian dedicated', I was paid $0.21/mile. That year (1990) I cleared $45k just from driving, and I cheated on my logs a LOT back then.

 

per a handy inflation calculator site; $45,000 in 1990 → 2023 | Inflation Calculator (in2013dollars.com)

$45,000 in 1990 is worth $104,710.90 today

I made about 30K-40K when I started in '85

 

And back then, what was your take home pay?
And, by the way, gross is before everything and take home is after all that stuff. Don't mix them in with each other.

If you went from 23 to 60 cpm, and ran the same amount of miles... DO NOT tell us that you make the same take home pay!
Or tell us that you took home 1k a week on 23 cpm.

 

Back at 23 cents a mile would easily do 4500 miles a week, on paper logs with extra stop pay so yeah probably in the ballpark of 1000
Now today again at 60 cents with eld you lucky if you break 2000 miles which would be 1200 before taxes so yeah still 1000 bucks.
The ones in charge know how to micro manage you enough to make you feel like you're making money but your really not making money

 

Don’t blame ELD for 2000mi/wk.

 

I look at this a little differently.
In the 70's 1 week pay would pay house payment and groceries.
The next pay would pay all the other bills plus more.
The rest of the month was free and clear.
And I didn't need to sleep in the truck, A motel was provided, plus meal allowance.
In order to do that now I would need about $2500 to $3000 a week.

 

That's the biggest part of it but also the micromanagement companies feel they need to deploy

 

It’s not the ELD, it’s poor planning by those in the office. I’m leased to a carrier and the weeks I’m out working I’m well over 2k miles a week but we have a good dispatch team and they keep you moving. When I’m away from the house I want to be rolling unless I need to take a 34. There are times that we don’t have any long loads to run over the weekend and they’ll preload trailers so that we can drop and hook and keep moving. We are coming up on 6 years since the mandate, it’s time to stop blaming the ELD for everything.