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School bus drivers

Official title Bus Drivers, School (SOC 53-3051)

Also called School bus operator, Student transportation driver, Special needs bus driver, Special education bus driver

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 402,930 US school bus drivers, with median pay of $47,920 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 80,000 from 1940, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for school bus drivers: GPS routing optimization + student-tracking apps, 2005 to 2020. No displacement; modest efficiency gains reduced total route miles but not driver headcount, as the split-shift structure means driver cost is largely fixed per route regardless of miles.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to change +0.7% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

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 .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). School bus drivers: jobs and pay since 1940 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-3051

Chicago

Future History. "School bus drivers: jobs and pay since 1940." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-3051.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_53_3051, author = {{Future History}}, title = {School bus drivers: jobs and pay since 1940}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-3051}}, 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
187519001925195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as School wagon driver / "kid hack" driver
Known then as School wagon driver (purpose-built school car)
Known then as School bus driver (motorized)
Known then as School bus driver / pupil transportation driver
Known then as School bus driver (CDL required)
Known then as Bus Driver, School (BLS SOC 53-3051)
Known today as Bus Driver, School (BLS SOC 53-3051)
Projected to still be called Bus Driver, School (BLS SOC 53-3051)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
403K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$47,920
Est.

≈ $46,691 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1869

Massachusetts funds horse-drawn school wagons: the first state-sponsored student transportation in the United States. The vehicles are repurposed farm wagons called "kid hacks," and the drivers are contract workers. The school calendar, the route structure, and the part-time employment model established in 1869 remain the defining features of the occupation 155 years later.

Beat · 1892

Wayne Agricultural Company (Richmond, Indiana) builds its first purpose-designed "school car", a horse-drawn vehicle with perimeter bench seating and a defined roof, on commission from an Ohio school district. The rear-entry door on this 1892 design, carried forward from the safety logic of horse-drawn vehicles, survives as the emergency exit in every modern school bus Type C and D body over 130 years later.

Beat · 1939

In April 1939, Frank W. Cyr (a rural education specialist at Teachers College, Columbia University) organizes a national conference funded by a $5,000 Rockefeller Foundation grant. Transportation officials from all 48 states, bus manufacturers, and paint chemists from DuPont and Pittsburgh Paints spend a week establishing 44 uniform national design, construction, and safety standards for school buses. Among them: National School Bus Glossy Yellow (Federal Standard No. 595a, Color 13432), chosen because "black lettering on it was most legible in semi-darkness." Cyr becomes known as the "Father of the Yellow School Bus." The color is still mandatory in every US state and Canadian province today.

Beat · 1971

On April 20, 1971, the Supreme Court unanimously decides Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, holding that busing students to achieve racial integration is a constitutionally permissible remedy for school segregation. The ruling opens the door to court-ordered busing programs across the South and Northern cities with de facto segregation. For school bus drivers, Swann was the most consequential single legal event in the occupation's history: routes were redrawn across district lines, total mileage increased dramatically, and drivers found themselves at the center of one of America's most contentious civil-rights debates, sometimes driving through picket lines of parents protesting the very routes the drivers were contracted to run.

Beat · 1986

Congress passes the Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which for the first time requires all school bus drivers in the United States to hold a Commercial Driver's License with a School Bus (S) endorsement. The requirement takes full effect in 1992. Before 1986, driver licensing for school buses was a patchwork of state rules; some districts were contracting with drivers who held nothing more than a standard automobile license. The CDL mandate is the most significant professional upgrade the occupation has seen, and the most significant supply constraint: it means that any shortage period is bottlenecked by CDL training throughput rather than willing applicants.

Beat · 2002

No Child Left Behind Act (2002) accelerates the growth of charter schools and school-choice policies that erode the traditional district attendance zone. Over the following decade, districts managing open-enrollment programs, magnet schools, and charter school transportation contracts find route planning increasingly complex: students no longer reliably live near their assigned school, and district transportation directors must maintain multiple overlapping route networks rather than a single neighborhood-based system. GPS routing software adoption accelerates in response.

Beat · 2021

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (November 2021) allocates $5 billion to the EPA's Clean School Bus Program: the largest single federal investment in school transportation in US history. The program funds the replacement of diesel school buses with zero-emission (electric or hydrogen) alternatives via competitive grant cycles beginning in 2022. By fiscal year 2024, thousands of electric school buses had been awarded across all 50 states. For drivers, the EV transition is the first significant occupational skill change in a generation: electric buses require regenerative braking technique adjustments, range management awareness, and new pre-trip inspection protocols for high-voltage systems.

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.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace school bus drivers? 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
+0.7%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 53-3051 (Bus drivers, school): 396.8 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 399.7 thousand in 2035, a change of +2.9 thousand (+0.7%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (0.1% 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)
17.6%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 53-3051.00 Bus Drivers, School. Shown: human-rated β = 0.176, 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) 0.353; GPT-4-rated β 0.324. 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 school bus drivers

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

AI is sitting alongside you hereConfirm student boarding and alighting using NFC scan stations integrated with the fleet management platform

Confirm student boarding and alighting using NFC scan stations integrated with the fleet management platform; resolve scan failures manually; report ridership counts and route completion data to the transportation office at end of run.[5],[11]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Treat accurate ridership scanning as a safety record, not paperwork. When a student is marked absent by the system but physically boarded, a quick manual correction prevents a parent alert triggering a false emergency. Accuracy here directly reduces administrative burden on the transportation office.

AI is sitting alongside you hereFollow assigned routes displayed on a driver tablet via AI-optimized routing software (Edulog/Transfinder integration)

Follow assigned routes displayed on a driver tablet via AI-optimized routing software (Edulog/Transfinder integration); adapt in real time to traffic, weather, or road hazards; notify dispatch of deviations and receive rerouting instructions.[11],[7]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Familiarize yourself with the district routing software interface so you can confirm route changes confidently and flag data errors (wrong address, missing stop) that affect student safety. Drivers who identify and correct routing errors become a valued feedback loop for the transportation department.

AI is sitting alongside you hereCommunicate route delays, incidents, and student concerns to dispatch and school administrators via two-way radio and fleet messaging

Communicate route delays, incidents, and student concerns to dispatch and school administrators via two-way radio and fleet messaging; respond to automated parent-notification alerts triggered by GPS deviation; submit written incident and student-behavior reports.[11],[1]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Learn the parent-alert communication chain your district uses (Samsara, Edulog Parent Portal, or a custom app). Drivers who understand when the system notifies parents automatically vs. when they need to call dispatch directly prevent duplicate escalations and build a professional reputation with administrators.

Where school bus drivers go next

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

What each move takes

Experienced school bus drivers understand routing, timing, and student-safety protocols from the driver side, which is valuable operational knowledge for a transportation dispatcher role. Many school districts promote long-tenure drivers into dispatch or transportation coordinator positions when they can no longer drive physically. The role requires radio communication fluency and scheduling software proficiency, both skills drivers already exercise daily. Note the lower CRI: dispatching is more exposed to AI scheduling automation than driving, so this pivot trades physical exposure for software-system exposure.

What you'd add
  • · Routing and dispatch software proficiency (Transfinder, Edulog, or equivalent)
  • · Multi-vehicle coordination and real-time re-routing under pressure
  • · Regulatory knowledge of CDL compliance, hours-of-service rules, and driver fitness requirements
  • · Data entry accuracy and incident documentation for fleet records
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of school bus drivers changed since 1869?

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

  • Horse-drawn school wagon ("kid hack"): the occupation is born

    Massachusetts passed America's first compulsory-education law in 1852, and by 1869 the state was funding horse-drawn wagons to transport rural students who lived beyond walking distance of the schoolhouse. The vehicle was a repurposed farm wagon with a roof and bench seats; drivers were seasonal contract workers, often farmers supplementing income. The critical institutional innovation was not the vehicle but the contract: for the first time, a public school district was paying a private individual specifically to transport children to school. This created the occupational template (a driver, a route, a schedule, a captive and vulnerable passenger cohort) that all subsequent technology would fit into rather than replace. Wayne Agricultural Company (Richmond, Indiana) built the first purpose-designed school vehicle in 1892 when an Ohio school district commissioned a horse-drawn "school car" with perimeter wooden bench seats and a defined roof. The rear-entry design that Wayne used in 1892, inherited from the safety logic of horse-drawn vehicles and preserved as an emergency exit, persists in modern school bus design over more than a century later.

    Effect on the work

    Created the occupation from scratch. Initial workforce consisted of seasonal contract drivers, not district employees. The part-time, school-calendar-dependent employment structure established in this era persists into the present day.

  • Motorized school bus (Wayne Works 1914, International Harvester 1915): the internal combustion era

    Wayne Works mounted a school bus body on an automotive chassis in 1914: the first motorized school car. International Harvester built its first motorized school bus in 1915. By 1919, all US states had allocated public funds for school bus transportation, and the fleet expansion was rapid: motorized buses could serve longer routes, carry more students, and maintain a schedule independent of horse health and weather conditions. The period ended with a landmark standardization. In April 1939, Frank W. Cyr (a rural education specialist at Teachers College, Columbia University) organized a national conference funded by a $5,000 Rockefeller Foundation grant. Transportation officials from all states, bus manufacturers, and paint chemists from DuPont and Pittsburgh Paints attended. The conference produced many uniform national design, construction, and safety standards, and chose a specific yellow-orange hue for the exterior because "black lettering on it was most legible in semi-darkness." National School Bus Glossy Yellow became Federal Standard No. 595a, Color 13432. Cyr became known as the "Father of the Yellow School Bus." The color is still standard in every US state and Canadian province today.

    Effect on the work

    Expanded the occupation significantly; motorized buses could serve more students per driver and enabled district consolidation of one-room schoolhouses into larger schools with transportation replacing walking. Drivers transitioned from seasonal contractors to more regular district employees as fleets grew.

  • Brown v. Board → Swann busing: route complexity doubles

    The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling struck down racial segregation in public schools, but desegregation moved slowly in most districts. By the late 1960s, federal courts were ordering active desegregation remedies, and in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (April 20, 1971), the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed that busing students to promote racial integration was a constitutionally permissible remedy. The decision opened the door to court-ordered busing programs across the South and, subsequently, in Northern cities with de facto segregation. For school bus drivers, Swann changed the job fundamentally. Routes that had previously been designed around residential proximity to a specific school were redrawn to achieve demographic balance: students traveled past their neighborhood school to a different one across the district. Route distances increased, overlap patterns became more complex, and the political visibility of school bus drivers rose sharply: busing was one of the most contentious domestic policy issues of the 1970s, and drivers found themselves in the middle of it, sometimes literally driving through protest lines. Driver employment expanded as route complexity and total mileage increased.

    Effect on the work

    Significant employment growth as court-ordered busing dramatically expanded route miles and increased the number of drivers needed per district. The occupation's public-facing role intensified; drivers became witnesses to, and sometimes targets of, anti-busing protests.

  • Commercial Driver's License (CDL) mandate: the occupation professionalizes

    The Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1986 required every school bus driver in the United States to obtain a Commercial Driver's License with a School Bus (S) endorsement: the first federal licensing standard applied uniformly across the states. Prior to 1986, school bus driver licensing was a patchwork of state requirements ranging from minimal to rigorous; some states required nothing beyond a standard automobile license for smaller buses. The CDL mandate took full effect in 1992 and required drivers to pass written knowledge tests, a vehicle inspection test, and a behind-the-wheel skills evaluation, in addition to a background check and sex offender registry check. The immediate effect was to reduce the pool of eligible applicants, people who had been informally driving small school vans without a CDL were no longer permitted to do so, and to increase the time and cost of hiring a new driver. This professionalization was appropriate to the safety responsibility, but it made the district's staffing problem more acute during any shortage period. The CDL requirement is the single most important structural constraint on the school bus driver labor supply: there is no path to the job without a successful CDL skills test, and CDL training backlogs become a binding constraint during shortage periods like 2022-2024.

    Effect on the work

    Professionalized the occupation and raised entry barriers; reduced informal gray-zone driving by non-CDL holders. Long-term effect was to tighten the supply pipeline in a way that any shortage period amplifies acutely.

  • GPS routing optimization + student-tracking apps (Transfinder, Here Comes the Bus, Edulog)

    Two connected technology shifts transformed the dispatch and monitoring side of school bus operations in the 2000s-2010s without displacing any driver. GPS-based route optimization software, notably Transfinder's Routefinder and Tyler Technologies' school transportation module, moved district routing from hand-drawn maps and institutional memory to algorithm-optimized routes that could be updated dynamically when student rosters changed, new schools opened, or traffic patterns shifted. Districts using routing software reported reductions in total route miles and corresponding fuel savings. Simultaneously, consumer-facing student-tracking apps (Here Comes the Bus [Synovia Solutions], Edulog, and school-district-branded variants) gave parents real-time GPS location of their child's bus, arrival prediction at each stop, and mobile alerts. These apps addressed one of the most persistent pain points in school transportation: the parent standing at the curb in winter wondering where the bus is. The driver's experience of the job did not materially change; the dispatch office's management of the driver did.

    Effect on the work

    No displacement; modest efficiency gains reduced total route miles but not driver headcount, as the split-shift structure means driver cost is largely fixed per route regardless of miles. Increased monitoring of individual driver performance via GPS telematics.

  • COVID-19 school closures + chronic driver shortage: the workforce fractures

    March 2020: districts across the country announced emergency school closures within days of COVID-19 arriving in the US. Unlike transit bus drivers who retained some service, school bus drivers had literally nothing to drive: schools were closed and students were home. Furloughs and layoffs followed immediately. Many experienced drivers, who skewed older (the median school bus driver age is in the mid-50s in most surveys), chose not to return: they retired, moved to Amazon delivery routes that paid comparable hourly wages for full-time schedules, or simply decided the pandemic had answered a question they had been deferring about whether to keep working. When districts reopened, they discovered that the driver pipeline they had relied on, experienced CDL holders willing to accept a split-shift schedule for part-time pay, had eroded severely. NAPT estimated more than 60,000 unfilled school bus driver positions nationally in 2022-2024, the most acute shortage the industry had recorded. Districts responded by raising wages, offering signing bonuses, consolidating routes, extending walk distances, and in some cases canceling after-school program service entirely.

    Effect on the work

    School districts were actively trying to hire drivers they could not find, not eliminating positions they no longer needed.

  • EPA Clean School Bus Program ($5B IRA): electric bus transition begins

    The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021) allocated $5 billion over five years (FY 2022-2026) to the EPA's Clean School Bus Program: the largest single federal investment in school transportation in US history. The program funds the replacement of older diesel school buses with zero-emission (electric or hydrogen fuel cell) and lower-emission alternatives via competitive grant and rebate cycles. The EPA began issuing awards in 2022; by fiscal year 2024, the program had funded thousands of electric school buses across all states. For school bus drivers, the EV transition represents the first significant skill-set change the job has seen in decades. Electric school buses operate differently from diesel: regenerative braking changes deceleration feel and technique, range management requires route-level awareness of battery state, and pre-trip inspection checklists now include high-voltage system checks that have no diesel analog. Blue Bird, the leading US school bus manufacturer, delivered its first production electric buses in September 2018 and had scaled to hundreds of units by 2024. Contractors and districts are building charging infrastructure and training programs simultaneously. This is a genuine re-training event for the incumbent workforce, not displacing drivers, but requiring them to develop new competencies on a shorter timeline than most occupational skill transitions.

    Effect on the work

    No displacement; the electric transition requires more driver training, not fewer drivers. Districts managing charging logistics and range constraints may adjust routes, slightly affecting individual driver assignments. The transition is a genuine skill-development moment for an occupation that had been largely static for decades.

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Bus Drivers, School employment and pay by year

On record since1869
Latest US employment402,930 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$47,920 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+0.7% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • United Kingdom (UK SOC 8212)

    Employment, 2025
    83,000, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14): employee jobs in SOC 8212 Bus and coach drivers, United Kingdom, 2025 (ASHE "number of jobs", thousands x1000; excludes self-employment). Open Government Licence v3.0.
    Median pay, 2025
    £33,947, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14.7a): median gross annual pay for all employee jobs in SOC 8212 Bus and coach drivers, United Kingdom, 2025. Open Government Licence v3.0.

  • Australia (ANZSCO 7312)

    Employment, 2025
    41,900, ABS Labour Force Survey Official statistic Report an errorABS Labour Force Survey (Detailed), table EQ08: employed persons in ANZSCO 7312 Bus and Coach Drivers, national (summed across sex and state/territory), annual average of 4 quarterly estimates.
    Median pay, 2025
    A$93,340, ABS Employee Earnings May 2025 Official statistic Report an errorAnnualised (x52) from A$1,795 median weekly earnings. ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025: median pay for full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate, before tax. Surfaced via the Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profile.
View all 9 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
194080,000n/aEst., Blue Bird Corporation Researched contextReport
1970230,000n/aEst., Wikipedia Researched contextReport
1990n/a$14,500Est., BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook Researched contextReport
2000458,000n/aEst., National Association for Pupil… Researched contextReport
2021361,420$37,910BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022366,550$41,270BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023371,530$45,660BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024387,920$47,040BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025402,930$47,920BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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