Truck Driver Pay in Wyoming (2026)

Key numbers at a glance

Truck driver pay in Wyoming: the numbers

The benchmark is the Bureau of Labor Statistics OEWS survey for heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers, May 2025 release. Wyoming counts roughly 6,050 driver jobs — about 21.6 of every 1,000 jobs in the state, the heaviest trucking concentration in this entire series, a remarkable figure for the least populous state in the country. Annual figures assume 2,080 hours, so treat them as full-time equivalents, and note that a sample this small moves more year to year than big-state numbers.

Wyoming beats the national numbers on every published cut — floor, median and ceiling — which surprises people who expect a rural energy state to pay rural wages. The logic is scarcity plus specialization: with barely 600,000 residents spread across a state bigger than half the countries in Europe, fleets must pay to import labor or keep it from drifting to Colorado and Utah, and a large share of the work is specialized — tankers, frac equipment, coal and aggregate, oversize loads — rather than commodity dry van. The top end shows it: $84,670 at the 90th percentile, more than $5,000 above the national cut, driven by energy-field hauling that pays premiums when activity runs hot. The cyclical footnote belongs in every Wyoming calculation — energy freight follows drilling and mining budgets, and those swing hard. CPM and hourly structures mix across segments; BLS does not track CPM and offers vary — confirm specifics with the carrier.

How miles and freight shape pay in Wyoming

Wyoming freight runs on two axes. The first is energy: the Powder River Basin in the northeast has historically been the country's largest coal-producing region and still moves coal by rail and truck at scale; oil and gas development in the Powder River, Green River and Jonah fields generates drilling-support, sand, pipe and liquids hauling; trona and soda ash out of the Green River basin feed a niche chemical-haul niche; and the state's wind boom has brought years of oversize turbine-component moves. The second axis is I-80 itself — one of the most heavily trucked transcontinental corridors in the country, carrying Chicago-to-West-Coast freight across 400 miles of high plains that are gloriously fast when clear and closed outright when the wind and snow combine. I-25 ties Cheyenne and Casper into Colorado's Front Range, and I-90 carries freight to the Black Hills and beyond. Roughly speaking, the native driver market is energy and construction hauling plus regional runs to Denver, Salt Lake and Billings, while an enormous share of the trucks on Wyoming roads belong to national OTR fleets just passing through.

The operating realities are the wind and the distance: empty miles are the default state in Wyoming, chain laws are a routine tool rather than an emergency measure, and wind warnings for high-profile vehicles close I-80 corridors dozens of times a year. Owner-operators should run every energy-boom offer through the load profit calculator with honest deadhead numbers, and price the weather risk into their true cost per mile — a Wyoming winter will find any budget that pretends it is Kansas. For more state-by-state comparisons, see the truck driver pay by state hub.

The tax angle in Wyoming

Wyoming levies no state individual income tax on wages — none — per the Wyoming Department of Revenue; the state funds itself on energy severance and sales taxes instead. On the $63,180 mean wage, that keeps roughly $2,500–$3,600 per year in the driver's pocket compared with a 4%–5.75% tax state, before credits — and paired with the second-highest mean wage in this series and a cost of living well below coastal metros, it makes Wyoming's take-home arithmetic among the strongest anywhere for CDL work. The offsetting costs are practical rather than fiscal: long distances for everything and brutal winters. Owner-operators still owe federal income and self-employment tax; for deduction basics that apply everywhere, see the trucking tax deductions guide.