Driver earnings as from start of career and onward

You are the biggest factor to your pay then comes what you get paid, the company, type of freight, and your dispatcher. To me aggressive means giving 115% on top of 110% it may not matter to your 1st company or it could just depends but when you get noticed it will help. My last job in 2 months they knew I would work as hard or harder than any driver they had. That lead to extra loads and some gravy $$$ loads. My 1st job didn't recognize my work but it payed off later. You can't think $/hr or day. This industry is bottom line. As mentioned above there will be good wks and bad, make the most outta the good 1s and salvage what you can of the bad. Most big companies have trucks governed under 65 some 70 so speeding isn't a problem.

 

in your first year plan on making about 28/35 k

remember you are with a beginner company and you will not make top dollar.
your second year maybe 35K

1200$ is not unheard of as a company driver. (i make that and then some) but it will not be with any of the bigger company's

 

The trouble today is that you have a lot of these refugee
drivers flown in here from other countries who are willing
to work for peanuts.
When you couple that with the battered economy you
soon realize that pay rates are going down - not up.
I know several drivers who could show me pay stubs
from years ago that are higher than they are now.
Truckin doesn't pay what it used to.
And it doesn't look good down the road.

 

I make over 60K a year been driving over 3 years. I work for a local company that does not believe in cheap freight. I am not paid by the mile I am paid 26% of the load. I am home every weekend and I do work some 6 day weeks. I avg about 3K miles a week to make my 60K+

 

Thanks. Please keep responses coming.

BTW, what do "L/O" and "O/O" mean?

Thanks again.

 

When you folks talk about working hard, what does that really mean? My understanding is that there are legal restrictions on the number of consecutive hours a driver can drive without a break. Speeding (fortunately) is becoming a technical/regulatory impossibility. I already said that I'm perfectly willing to do stuff like drive through Easter. I'm not going to be making requests to be home; in fact, I want to be on the road as much as possible. The more I'm home, the more expenses I'll have. What's left, as far as applying myself more than the next guy?

Thanks.

 

I just realized that "O/O" and "L/O" mean, respectively, owner-operator and lease-operator. How exactly do those arrangements work?

Thanks.

 

Four things:

(1) What do you folks mean by a "local company"? I want to be on the road for uninterrupted hours at a time, listening to the radio and books on "tape". If "local company" means something like "only operates in Illinois" or "...the midwest," cool.

(2) Am I supposed to rate people's responses to my questions, or something like that? The replied to my question have dropped off to nothing. Did I offend responders accidentally or violate some sort of forum etiquette?

(3) I'm still interested in replies to my original post. Assume I don't want to be an owner-operator. If somebody could explain how the lease-operator business arrangement works (how much of an upfront investment would I need to make, who hires whom, who pays for what, what kind of freedom is involved vs. working directly for a company), I'd really appreciate that. How long should I wait from the time I get out of school before it might make sense to consider doing this?

(4) Am I going to severely limit the number of companies that might be willing to hire me (or do lease-operator arrangements) if I get a small, well-trained, very tame dog to ride with me? How about doing this 6 months or 1 year out of school? What if I wait longer (a bad option, from a psychological standpoint)?

Thanks a lot, everybody.

 

Hope this helps.

 

after reading lots of post on this site and checking adds for drivers expect about 10.00 an hour avg. witch is sad considering all the skill and responsability demanded of a driver. you can make more at mc donalds! everyone tells me you cant make any money in trucking but i sure see alot of trucks running the roads? i just dont get it. pretty disgusting.