Travel Tips

How Much Can A Truck Driver Make?

Are you looking around for a new job? Or have you ever wondered how much a truck operator earns? If the adverts in the truckers’ magazines are to be believed, it is easy to get a driving job paying $100,000 a year as an owner driver.

This may be true, but it is definite that you can make a good living by owning and driving your own truck. There are several good causes for this. There is a worsening lack of people who are willing to drive long distances and stay away from home for a night or more and yet more items are being imported and so have to be distributed from ports to distribution warehouses.

Many owner operators like the lifestyle of being their own boss and not having anyone breathing down their neck. Owner drivers often take their spouse or their dog on journeys with them and a modern cab is more like a small caravan that a car.

There are three major sorts of driving job available in the truck driving industry:

The first is the owner driver or owner operator. This type of operator owns his or her own tractor – the cab part that pulls the trailer.This driver is frequently contracted to a haulage firm and is paid per mile and is at least partially responsible for fuel and repair bills. It is normally the highest paying trucking alternative.

The second is the company driver. A company operator does not own his or her own truck and will usually get a wage based on hours or miles. A company driver typically does not have the same level of control over his wages that an owner driver has.

The third sort is the independent trucker. The independent trucker is fundamentally a mini haulage company. He or she has to find the loads, deliver them, make sure he gets paid, repair the wagon and everything else that a boss has to do, but without the corporate support and regular loads that an owner operator has from his haulage company.

If you are interested in this kind of business, the first thing you will need is a Commercial Drivers License (CDL) in the USA or Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV) License in the UK.

Most truck operators attend a truck driving school where they will be given intensive training on how to drive a semi, as the tractor-cum-cab is called. Training will be given on driving and the written part of the state exam. After graduating from the driving school, you will be able to apply for your CDL or HGV.

On the other hand, you may be able to get in with a large haulage company that runs its own in-house training programme. This is better still as it may ensure you a job with that company for a while and that will help you establish a financial record should you want finance to buy your own vehicle later.

Once you are legal, you can rely on your training school to help you get a job, you could phone around, look on the Internet or go and get one of those truckers’ magazines where they advertise jobs at $100,000 a year.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on various subjects, but is at present concerned with truck sat nav systems. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Laser Temperature Gun.

© 2010 Travel Oversea.