Time Machine

Highway maintenance workers

Name: Highway Maintenance Workers: employment and wages since 1935
Creator: Future History
License: https://futurehistory.earth/terms

Also called Road maintenance worker, Highway crew worker, Road crew, DOT maintenance worker, Highway technician

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 154,960 US highway maintenance workers, with median pay of $50,260 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 137,000 from 1935, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for highway maintenance workers: GPS fleet management and AI pavement scanning, 2010 to 2020. AI-assisted pavement scanning reduces the need for dedicated inspection crews but does not reduce the need for repair crews; it changes what repair crews are doing and in what sequence.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 3.4% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

0% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend.

Last updated 11 October 2026.

Cite this page

APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Highway maintenance workers: jobs and pay since 1935 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/47-4051

Chicago

Future History. "Highway maintenance workers: jobs and pay since 1935." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/47-4051.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_47_4051, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Highway maintenance workers: jobs and pay since 1935}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/47-4051}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time

180018251850187519001925195019752000now

2026

Known then as Turnpike Laborer / Road Commissioner's Gang (private turnpike era)

Known then as Road Crew / Section Hand / Road Superintendent's Gang (county road era)

Known then as Highway Maintenance Man / Road Maintenance Laborer (Federal-Aid era)

Known then as Highway Maintenance Worker / Road Patrolman (Interstate System era)

Known then as Highway Maintenance Workers (BLS SOC 47-4051)

Known today as Highway Maintenance Workers (BLS SOC 47-4051)

Projected to still be called Highway Maintenance Workers (BLS SOC 47-4051)

Data from the May 2025 survey

US Employment

155K

Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic

Report an error

Median Annual Wage

$50,260

Est.

≈ $48,971 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic

Report an error

Beat · 1793

The Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike opens as the first long-distance macadamized road in the United States, establishing the model of a private corporation employing permanent paid road crews to maintain a route for toll revenue. Before this, American road maintenance was handled through compulsory labor: male residents were legally required to contribute a few days of road work each spring or pay a fine. The turnpike model replaced conscripted farmers with a permanent, paid section crew whose livelihood depended on keeping the road open -- the first recognizable ancestor of the modern highway maintenance workforce.

Beat · 1914

The Office of Public Roads, the predecessor agency to today's Federal Highway Administration, creates a Division of Road Maintenance in response to "growing demands from local officials for advice and assistance in preserving the many new roads." This is the federal government's first formal acknowledgment that road maintenance is a distinct function requiring dedicated expertise and staffing, separate from road construction. Two years later, the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 would make maintenance a condition of federal highway funding, requiring states receiving federal dollars to keep the roads they built in proper repair.

Beat · 1916

The Federal Aid Road Act, signed by President Woodrow Wilson on July 11, 1916, creates the first federal highway funding program and establishes the principle that states are responsible for maintaining the roads they build with federal money. The act requires states to have a highway department capable of supervising construction and maintenance work. This is the legal foundation for the state-employed highway maintenance workforce that would grow steadily over the following century, eventually accounting for roughly 95% of all BLS 47-4051 employment.

Beat · 1935

At its peak in 1938, the Works Progress Administration employed three million people, with road and street projects accounting for a significant share of the work. The WPA paved or repaired 280,000 miles of roads and built more than 620,000 miles of streets, deploying road crews across every state in the union. For thousands of workers with no prior road experience, this was the entry point into a trade they would stay in for careers -- skilled heavy-equipment operators, pavement workers, and crew supervisors whose Depression-era training shaped the postwar highway maintenance workforce.

Beat · 1956

The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act authorizes 41,000 miles of limited-access highway and creates the Highway Trust Fund to pay for them. The 1956 Act deliberately does not provide federal funding for maintenance of Interstate routes -- that responsibility stays with the states, consistent with the principle established in 1916. As the Interstate system is built out through the 1960s and 1970s, state DOTs expand their maintenance workforces proportionally. By the mid-1970s, however, energy crisis-driven budget cuts force many states to defer maintenance, and the Interstate system begins deteriorating faster than it is being repaired -- a deferred-maintenance debt that eventually triggers the 1976 and 1981 federal interventions.

Beat · 1991

The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) creates the Interstate Maintenance Program, the first standing federal funding stream specifically for Interstate rehabilitation. For highway maintenance workers, ISTEA represents a philosophical shift: from "fix it when it breaks" to "manage pavement condition systematically." State DOTs begin adopting pavement management systems that prioritize repairs by condition index score rather than visible urgency. This data-driven approach is the institutional precursor to the AI pavement scanning tools that would arrive in the 2010s.

Beat · 2021

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act) commits $110 billion to roads and bridges over five years -- the largest federal highway investment since the Interstate program. A substantial share of the funding is directed at preservation and rehabilitation of existing roads rather than new construction, which means it flows disproportionately to state DOT maintenance budgets and the highway maintenance workforce. FHWA apportionments to states through 2024-26 have supported expanded maintenance programs and, in some states, hiring freezes being reversed after years of attrition.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

How it began · 1793

In 1793, the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike became the first macadamized long-distance road in the United States, stretching 62 miles through Pennsylvania and employing a permanent crew of road workers whose sole job was to keep it passable. This was new. Before private turnpike corporations arrived, American roads were maintained by an obligation system: male property holders were legally required to appear for a few days each spring with their own shovels and fill the worst ruts, or pay a fine in lieu. The results were reliably terrible. Turnpike companies changed the incentive structure: toll revenue created a financial stake in road quality, and that stake funded year-round paid maintenance crews rather than conscripted reluctant farmers. Workers broke stone by hand to the specification Scottish engineer John Loudon McAdam had refined: no fragment larger than an ounce per inch of road width, small enough to fit in a person's mouth, packed into interlocking layers over a crowned subgrade that shed water to side ditches. The first American macadam road was the Boonsborough Turnpike in Maryland, completed in 1823; the National Pike followed in 1830. By mid-century the nation had roughly 10,000 miles of private toll roads, each requiring a permanent section crew to patrol for washouts, fill holes, re-crown drainage, and clear fallen timber. When the turnpike era gave way to railroads and then to county-managed dirt roads in the mid-1800s, the paid maintenance crew concept survived in the county road gang, directed by an elected road commissioner whose crew scraped and graded the local network with a horse-drawn road machine. The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 nationalized the principle: states receiving federal highway funds were required to maintain the roads they built, giving rise to state highway department maintenance divisions with permanent workforces organized by route segment. The Interstate Highway System of 1956 then multiplied the maintained lane-miles by orders of magnitude, locking in a large permanent maintenance workforce that has lasted to the present day.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace highway maintenance workers? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say

Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

→ 2035

+3.4%

BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 47-4051 (Highway maintenance workers): 161.8 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 167.3 thousand in 2035, a change of +5.5 thousand (+3.4%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (1% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.

Official statisticReport an error

How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)

Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.

Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"

2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)

of tasks

What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 47-4051.00 Highway Maintenance Workers. Shown: human-rated β = 0, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0; GPT-4-rated β 0.016. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error

Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for highway maintenance workers

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereOperate Automated Flagger Assistance Devices (AFADs) to control one-way traffic through active work zones, replacing manual flagging at high-risk locations while monitoring live camera feeds from a safe standoff position.

Operate Automated Flagger Assistance Devices (AFADs) to control one-way traffic through active work zones, replacing manual flagging at high-risk locations while monitoring live camera feeds from a safe standoff position.^[4],[6]

Tools picking this up

Site 20/20 Guardian SmartFlagger ↗

Where your edge is

Get certified on AFAD operation and remote-monitoring interfaces; understand when to override automated signals manually based on site conditions like emergency vehicles or equipment breakdowns.

AI is sitting alongside you hereConduct visual and hands-on inspections of drainage systems, culverts, bridges, and tunnel surfaces, cross-referencing findings against drone-captured image datasets and AI defect-classification outputs to triage which repairs need crews immediately vs

Conduct visual and hands-on inspections of drainage systems, culverts, bridges, and tunnel surfaces, cross-referencing findings against drone-captured image datasets and AI defect-classification outputs to triage which repairs need crews immediately vs. next maintenance cycle.^[7],[5]

Tools picking this up

Beyond Vision HEIFU Pro / beXStream ↗

Where your edge is

Develop the ability to verify or override AI defect-severity scores by understanding what ground-truth inspection reveals vs. what camera-based detection misses (subsurface delamination, hidden rebar corrosion).

AI is sitting alongside you hereSet up and manage smart work zone sensor arrays, including portable radar speed sensors, Bluetooth/Wi-Fi readers, and LiDAR-camera pods that feed queue-warning systems (QWS) and dynamic message signs to alert approaching drivers.

Set up and manage smart work zone sensor arrays, including portable radar speed sensors, Bluetooth/Wi-Fi readers, and LiDAR-camera pods that feed queue-warning systems (QWS) and dynamic message signs to alert approaching drivers.^[8],[4]

Tools picking this up

Smart Work Zone Queue Warning Systems ↗

Where your edge is

Learn to interpret real-time dashboards from queue-warning systems and understand how to adjust sensor placement for site geometry; study FHWA and MUTCD guidelines on smart work zone deployment.

Where highway maintenance workers go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

Civil Engineering Technologists and Technicians
US median pay
$64,950 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+3.2%
Operating Engineers and Other Construction Equipment Operators
US median pay
$59,850 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+4.6%
Construction and Building Inspectors
US median pay
$74,690 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
0%

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Civil Engineering Technologists and Technicians

Civil Engineering Technologists apply the same road, drainage, and structure knowledge in design-support and QA roles, working with survey data, pavement models, and construction documents. The pivot rewards workers who have built strong field intuition and are willing to add CAD and engineering-tech coursework.

What you'd add

· AutoCAD Civil 3D or MicroStation basics
· Construction materials testing (soils, concrete, asphalt)
· Associate degree or NICET certification in Civil Engineering Technology
· Reading and interpreting design plans and specifications

What it takesA real upskill, but a natural one

Tools of the era

How has the work of highway maintenance workers changed since 1793?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

Hand tools and horse-drawn road scraper (pick, shovel, stone hammer, drag)
The first road maintenance crews worked entirely by hand and animal power. Stone breakers used hammers to fracture rock to McAdam's specification: no fragment larger than could fit in a person's mouth. Workers packed layers by tamping and relied on traffic to compact the surface. The horse-drawn road drag, a simple log or plank pulled diagonally across a dirt surface, was the primary grading tool on unpaved county roads into the late 19th century. There was no separation between maintenance and construction labor; the same crew that built a road patrolled and repaired it.
Steam roller and early road machine (Adams road machine, steam-powered compaction)
The Adams road machine, widely adopted by county road departments after the 1870s, gave a single operator with a horse team the ability to grade and crown a road surface in a fraction of the time a hand crew required. Steam rollers from the 1860s onward replaced tamping labor on macadam roads, compressing stone to final grade mechanically. Neither machine eliminated the road crew; both created new operator roles while reducing the number of hand laborers per lane-mile. The Good Roads Movement of the 1890s, backed by bicycle manufacturers and the League of American Wheelmen, accelerated mechanization of county road maintenance as it lobbied for improved road standards.
Effect on the work
Mechanization of grading and compaction reduced the number of hand laborers required per lane-mile of maintenance but created new machine-operator roles. The net workforce impact through the 1920s was an overall increase in the size of the road maintenance workforce, driven by rapid expansion of the road network, not any contraction from individual productivity gains.
Motor grader, asphalt paver, and pneumatic-tire roller (diesel mechanization era)
The shift from macadam and brick to hot-mix asphalt, accelerated by the interstate construction program of the late 1950s and 1960s, transformed what maintenance workers had to know. Asphalt patching required an asphalt kettle or later a hot-box trailer, infrared heaters, and pneumatic tampers rather than stone-breaking hammers. Diesel motor graders replaced horse-drawn road machines for shoulder and drainage work. Snowplow attachments on trucks became standard in northern-state fleets from the 1940s. The work became equipment-intensive rather than labor-intensive: a two-person crew with a grader and a dump truck could maintain five times the lane-mileage a 1910 hand crew could. State highway departments formalized route-based patrol systems in which each crew was responsible for a defined highway segment, creating the recognizable modern structure of the role.
ISTEA and 3R/4R programs (federal Interstate Maintenance funding; systematic pavement management)
The 1991 Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act established the Interstate Maintenance (IM) Program, replacing ad-hoc resurfacing appropriations with a systematic federal funding stream for resurfacing, restoration, rehabilitation, and reconstruction of Interstate routes. For maintenance workers, this meant a shift from crisis-response patching to scheduled pavement management: pavement condition index surveys drove work orders, and crews were deployed according to data rather than just visible deterioration. The IM program also introduced performance standards: states had to demonstrate that the Interstate system met minimum pavement quality thresholds to maintain eligibility. This era marks the beginning of the data-driven work assignment that AI-based pavement scanning tools would accelerate in the 2010s.
Effect on the work
The systematic pavement management model increased the productivity of maintenance crews by reducing wasted trips to roads not yet needing treatment. However, it also made workforce size more legible to budget analysts, contributing to periodic DOT staff reduction efforts in states under fiscal pressure.
GPS fleet management and AI pavement scanning (Pavemetrics LCMS, road-condition mapping)
The first commercial deployment of high-speed laser pavement condition survey vehicles in the 2000s, reaching widespread DOT use by the early 2010s, changed how maintenance crews received their work orders. Instead of a supervisor walking a section and noting defects by observation, a laser survey vehicle running at highway speed produced a full pavement condition index map of the route, flagging cracks, ruts, and delamination at millimeter resolution. GPS fleet management systems simultaneously let dispatchers track crew locations, assign work orders from a tablet, and log completed repairs with coordinates. Together these tools shifted a portion of the diagnostic work from field crews to remote analysts, while giving crews more precise location information for where to apply the next ton of hot mix.
Effect on the work
AI-assisted pavement scanning reduces the need for dedicated inspection crews but does not reduce the need for repair crews; it changes what repair crews are doing and in what sequence. Hundreds of Pavemetrics LCMS-2 systems have been deployed globally as of 2024, suggesting the technology is now a standard DOT tool rather than an early-adopter experiment.
Smart work zones and Automated Flagger Assistance Devices (AFADs)
Automated Flagger Assistance Devices, which control one-way traffic through work zones without a human standing in the travel lane, began reaching commercial scale around 2020-2022. The Site 20/20 Guardian SmartFlagger won the ATSSA Innovation Award in 2022. Smart work zone systems combining portable radar, LiDAR-camera pods, and queue-warning displays were deployed by Florida and Texas DOT with documented reductions in rear-end crash potential. These technologies address the most dangerous aspect of the highway maintenance worker's job: traffic exposure. The direction is not replacement of the worker but relocation of the worker to a safer position while technology handles the traffic interface. As of 2025-26, AFADs are used at high-risk one-lane alternating-traffic points, but crew members remain on site to monitor, respond to anomalies, and perform the physical repair work.
Effect on the work
AFADs directly target this hazard by removing the human flagger from the travel lane. The technology does not reduce crew size but changes crew positioning and risk profile.

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Highway Maintenance Workers employment and pay by year

On record since1793

Latest US employment154,960 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Latest US median pay$50,260 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Outlook+3.4% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

View all 27 years of cited US data, each linked to its source

Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source	Report
1935	137,000	n/a	Est., Federal Highway Administration Researched context	Report
1936	n/a	$900	Est., Federal Highway Administration Researched context	Report
1960	85,000	n/a	Est., FHWA Researched context	Report
2000	145,790	$30,000	BLS OEWS 2000 (employment) Official statisticEst., O*NET 47-4051.00 (pay) Researched context	Report
2003	140,450	$28,650	BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic	Report
2004	136,550	$29,550	BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic	Report
2005	140,600	$30,250	BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic	Report
2006	138,670	$31,540	BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic	Report
2007	137,140	$32,600	BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic	Report
2008	136,420	$34,000	BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic	Report
2009	139,490	$34,250	BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic	Report
2010	142,530	$34,780	BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statistic	Report
2011	143,760	$35,220	BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic	Report
2012	141,180	$35,260	BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic	Report
2013	139,070	$35,870	BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic	Report
2014	140,650	$36,580	BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic	Report
2015	142,300	$36,930	BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic	Report
2016	143,320	$38,130	BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic	Report
2017	146,580	$38,700	BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic	Report
2018	149,260	$39,690	BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic	Report
2019	150,860	$40,730	BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic	Report
2020	149,890	$41,660	BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic	Report
2021	141,150	$45,880	BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic	Report
2022	143,330	$44,930	BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic	Report
2023	150,860	$47,360	BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic	Report
2024	151,750	$49,070	BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic	Report
2025	154,960	$50,260	BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic	Report

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Where highway maintenance workers go next

Civil Engineering Technologists and Technicians

Hand tools and horse-drawn road scraper (pick, shovel, stone hammer, drag)Hand tools1793–1870

Steam roller and early road machine (Adams road machine, steam-powered compaction)Steam roller1870–1930

Motor grader, asphalt paver, and pneumatic-tire roller (diesel mechanization era)Motor grader1930–1970

ISTEA and 3R/4R programs (federal Interstate Maintenance funding; systematic pavement management)ISTEA1991–2010

GPS fleet management and AI pavement scanning (Pavemetrics LCMS, road-condition mapping)GPS fleet management2010–2020

Smart work zones and Automated Flagger Assistance Devices (AFADs)Smart work zones2020–present

Highway Maintenance Workers employment and pay by year

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