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Service station attendants

Official title Automotive and Watercraft Service Attendants (SOC 53-6031)

Also called Gas station attendant, Fuel service attendant, Lube technician, Quick lube attendant, Marina fuel dock attendant

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 102,010 US service station attendants, with median pay of $35,670 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2012, the highest was 118,850, in May 2017. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 5 from 1913, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for service station attendants: Pay-at-the-pump card reader + quick-lube POS, 1985 to 2010. Pay-at-pump removed forecourt attendants from nearly all self-service stations, while the quick-lube and tire-service segment absorbed much of the remaining hands-on work.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 3.8% 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. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Service station attendants: jobs and pay since 1913 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-6031

Chicago

Future History. "Service station attendants: jobs and pay since 1913." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-6031.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_53_6031, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Service station attendants: jobs and pay since 1913}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-6031}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

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drag to travel through time
1925195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Filling Station Attendant / Service Station Attendant (full-service era)
Known then as Gas Station Attendant / Gas Jockey (full-service dominant, self-serve emerging)
Known then as Service Station Attendant / Lube Technician (self-serve transition era)
Known then as Automotive and Watercraft Service Attendants (BLS SOC 53-6031)
Known today as Automotive and Watercraft Service Attendants (BLS SOC 53-6031)
Projected to still be called Automotive and Watercraft Service Attendants (BLS SOC 53-6031)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
102K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$35,670
Est.

≈ $34,755 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1913

December 1913: the Gulf Refining Company opens the first purpose-built drive-in filling station at Baum Boulevard and St. Clair Street in Pittsburgh, with a manager and four attendants. It sells thirty gallons at twenty-seven cents a gallon on day one and distributes the first free road maps in America. Full-service is the model from the very beginning: the attendant pumps the gas, checks the oil and water, and cleans the windshield while the driver stays in the car.

Beat · 1947

Frank Urich opens the first self-service filling station in Los Angeles, with self-serve pumps and roller-skating attendants who reset the dispensers and collected money. His slogan, "Save five cents, serve yourself. Why pay more?", and a reported half-million gallons sold in the first month proved the concept worked. It was immediately controversial: competitors fought it, and many states moved to restrict or ban self-service on safety grounds and to protect attendant jobs.

Beat · 1949

New Jersey bans self-service fueling, a law passed after lobbying by service-station owners and framed around safety. The ban would prove remarkably durable: decades after the rest of the country moved to self-service, New Jersey still requires an attendant to pump every gallon, keeping a version of the original full-service role alive in one state by law.

Beat · 1973

The OPEC oil embargo quadruples crude prices and makes price-per-gallon the thing drivers care about most. Self-service stations, which run with far fewer employees, can undercut full-service on price, and motorists choose the savings. Self-service islands become the fastest-growing format of the decade, states repeal their self-service bans, and the full-service attendant begins disappearing in earnest. Self-service rises from about 22% of the market in 1975 toward dominance over the next two decades.

Beat · 1997

Self-service is now near-universal and the number of full-service stations has fallen to roughly 40,000, down from about 220,000 in the 1970s. The uniformed gas jockey, one of the most familiar working figures in mid-century America, has been displaced over a single generation. The occupation does not vanish, but it reorganizes: the work that remains shifts into quick-lube oil-change shops, tire and battery service, and marina fuel docks.

Beat · 2023

Oregon ends its decades-long ban on self-service gas: the legislature passes House Bill 2426, signed in August 2023, requiring stations to keep at least half their open pumps attended while allowing the rest to go self-serve. The change leaves New Jersey as the only remaining state where drivers may not pump their own gas, the last full-service stronghold of the role that defined the occupation for its first sixty years.

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 service station attendants? 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
+3.8%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 53-6031 (Automotive and watercraft service attendants): 102.4 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 106.3 thousand in 2035, a change of +3.9 thousand (+3.8%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers. 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)
6.5%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 53-6031.00 Automotive and Watercraft Service Attendants. Shown: human-rated β = 0.065, 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) 0.13; GPT-4-rated β 0.13. 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 service station attendants

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

AI is sitting alongside you hereProcess customer transactions for fuel, accessories, and services using a POS terminal, handling cash, credit, fleet cards, and contactless payments.

Process customer transactions for fuel, accessories, and services using a POS terminal, handling cash, credit, fleet cards, and contactless payments.[1],[4]

Where your edge is

Shift focus from handling payment mechanics (increasingly automated via pay-at-pump and mobile wallets) to consultative upselling of maintenance add-ons flagged by the POS system.

AI is sitting alongside you hereOrder, price, and stock automotive accessories and consumables (batteries, wiper blades, motor oils, additives), conducting physical inventory counts aligned to POS reorder triggers.

Order, price, and stock automotive accessories and consumables (batteries, wiper blades, motor oils, additives), conducting physical inventory counts aligned to POS reorder triggers.[1],[6]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Use POS inventory modules to set automated reorder thresholds rather than relying on manual shelf counts, freeing time for customer-facing service work.

AI is sitting alongside you hereActivate fuel dispensers and pump gasoline, diesel, or marine fuel into customer vehicles or watercraft, verifying grade and volume against POS receipts.

Activate fuel dispensers and pump gasoline, diesel, or marine fuel into customer vehicles or watercraft, verifying grade and volume against POS receipts.[1],[7]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Learn to operate cloud-connected dispenser management consoles (Gilbarco Insite360) that remotely monitor pump status, flag anomalies, and automate compliance reporting.

Where service station attendants go next

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

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Electricians

The rapid expansion of EV charging infrastructure creates a pathway from fuel attendant to licensed electrician, with EV charging installation being the fastest-growing segment. Requires completing an electrical apprenticeship (several years) and state licensure, but median wages nearly double and the role is far more automation-resilient.

What you'd add
  • · EVSE (Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment) installation fundamentals (GPTC or NYSERDA certificate)
  • · NEC Article 625 (EV charging) and basic electrical code knowledge
  • · Electrical apprenticeship enrollment (IBEW or NECA)
  • · Conduit bending and panel work during apprenticeship rotations
What it takesA real upskill, but a natural one
Tools of the era

How has the work of service station attendants changed since 1913?

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

  • Hand-cranked visible-register gas pump + manual service kit

    The original attendant's toolkit was almost entirely manual. The visible-register pump required the attendant to hand-crank fuel up into a glass cylinder marked in gallons so the customer could see the measure, then gravity-feed it into the tank. Everything else was embodied skill: checking oil with a dipstick and a rag, topping the radiator, measuring tire pressure with a pencil gauge, and wiping the windshield. There was no automation at all; the entire value of the station was the attendant's hands and attention.

  • Self-service pump + mechanical computing dispenser (Frank Urich, Los Angeles, 1947)

    In 1947 a Los Angeles station owner named Frank Urich opened the first self-service filling station, with rows of self-serve pumps and roller-skating attendants who collected money and reset the dispensers between customers. His pitch was blunt: "Save five cents, serve yourself. Why pay more?" The pumps used a mechanical computing dispenser that an attendant zeroed for each customer. This was the first technology that directly substituted for the core attendant task of pumping fuel. It was bitterly resisted: competitors hated it, and many states passed laws restricting or banning self-service to protect attendant jobs and on safety grounds, which is why the format spread slowly for the next two decades.

    Effect on the work

    Self-service remained a minority format through the 1950s and 1960s, capped by state bans and consumer habit; as late as 1975 only about 22% of the gasoline market was self-service. The attendant role was not yet seriously threatened, but the mechanism for its later collapse was now proven and in the field.

  • Self-service islands + the 1973 oil shock (price-per-gallon over service)

    The 1973 OPEC oil embargo quadrupled crude prices and made the price at the pump the thing drivers cared about most. Self-service stations could undercut full-service on price because they ran with far fewer employees, and once gasoline got expensive, motorists chose savings over having their windshield wiped. Self-service islands became the fastest-growing format of the 1970s, states repealed their self-service bans, and the economics flipped permanently. The technology here was not new hardware so much as a new labor model: the customer became the unpaid pump operator.

    Effect on the work

    Self-service share of the gasoline market rose from about 22% in 1975 to roughly 86% by 1992 and to near-universal by the late 1990s. The count of full-service stations fell from about 220,000 in the 1970s to roughly 40,000 by 1997. The uniformed full-service attendant was largely displaced over a single generation, the most dramatic technology-driven contraction in this occupation's history.

  • Pay-at-the-pump card reader + quick-lube POS (VIN lookup, oil-sticker printing)

    Two technologies finished off the transactional side of the job and redirected the survivors. Pay-at-the-pump card readers, which spread through the late 1980s and 1990s, removed the last reason an attendant had to be present at the forecourt: the customer now pumped and paid without ever speaking to a person. At the same time, the part of the occupation that survived migrated into dedicated quick-lube shops, where point-of-sale software looked up a vehicle's make, model, and manufacturer-recommended service intervals from the plate or VIN, printed the windshield reminder sticker, and tracked bay throughput. The attendant who once pumped gas became, in the surviving format, a quick-lube technician working a structured service ticket.

    Effect on the work

    Pay-at-pump removed forecourt attendants from nearly all self-service stations, while the quick-lube and tire-service segment absorbed much of the remaining hands-on work. The net effect was a smaller, more maintenance-focused occupation rather than total disappearance.

  • Connected forecourt + digital vehicle inspection + marina management software

    The contemporary attendant works inside a layer of software that monitors the equipment and digitizes the service record. Cloud-connected dispenser-management consoles such as Gilbarco Insite360 remotely watch every pump, flag anomalies, and automate compliance reporting, so the attendant no longer walks the forecourt logging readings by hand. In the quick-lube bay, digital vehicle inspection apps photograph fluid and tire findings and text them to the customer, turning a check into a documented, upsell-ready record. At marina fuel docks, platforms like DockMaster handle fuel billing, slip reservations, and real-time inventory. None of this removes the core hands-on tasks of pumping, checking, changing, and assisting; it reorganizes the paperwork around them.

    Effect on the work

    These tools mostly augment rather than replace: they shift the attendant's time from manual logging and tickets toward the physical service and customer interaction that still require a person on site. No credible source quantifies a headcount effect specific to 53-6031 from this software layer.

  • EV charging + electrification of the forecourt

    Electric vehicles are the next structural shift, and they cut both ways for this role. An EV needs no oil change, no spark plug, and far less routine fluid service, which erodes the quick-lube core of the modern occupation over time. But charging stations are creating an adjacent assistance role: helping drivers start a session, explaining charging speeds, checking connector compatibility, and troubleshooting faults flagged by the charging-network software. Whether the gas-station service attendant of today becomes the EV charging attendant of tomorrow, or whether self-serve charging needs no attendant at all, is the open question that defines the role's next two decades.

    Effect on the work

    BLS attributes its near-flat projection for the occupation partly to electrification reducing routine internal-combustion maintenance. The countervailing EV-charging-assistance role is real but not yet large enough, or cleanly enough classified under 53-6031, to register in the headcount.

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Automotive and Watercraft Service Attendants employment and pay by year

On record since1913
Latest US employment102,010 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$35,670 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+3.8% 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.

  • Canada (NOC 65101)

    Employment, 2020
    8,975, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 65101 Service station attendants, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
    Median pay, 2020
    C$29,400, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 65101 Service station attendants, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.
View all 27 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
19135n/aEst., American Oil & Gas Historical Society Researched contextReport
1960n/a$3,400Est., University of Missouri Libraries Researched contextReport
1970220,000n/aEst., Reference for Business Researched contextReport
199740,000n/aEst., Reference for Business Researched contextReport
200396,250$16,870BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
200490,640$17,240BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
200596,340$17,300BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
200694,780$17,750BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
200793,140$18,290BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
200884,480$18,950BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
200979,480$19,290BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
201086,440$19,540BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
2011102,090$19,930BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
2012108,510$20,140BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
2013112,970$20,470BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
2014104,750$20,900BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015109,710$21,560BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016109,790$22,420BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017118,850$23,390BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018113,760$24,200BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019117,670$25,200BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020112,750$26,540BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021111,480$29,330BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
202299,600$30,850BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
202392,530$33,820BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
202498,270$34,850BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025102,010$35,670BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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