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Vehicle and equipment cleaners

Official title Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment (SOC 53-7061)

Also called Car wash attendant, Auto detailer, Vehicle detailer, Car detailer, Car wash worker

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 380,430 US vehicle and equipment cleaners, with median pay of $35,830 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 382,670, in May 2019, close to the May 2025 count. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 20 from 1914, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for vehicle and equipment cleaners: Express exterior model + scheduling, CRM, and inventory software, 2010 to 2023.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 3.9% 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
  • 0.37 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013

Since the 2013 prediction

In 2013, Frey and Osborne put this job's probability of computerisation at 0.37. BLS counted 311,940 of these jobs in May 2013 and 380,430 in May 2025 (+22%, a change derived by Future History).

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). Vehicle and equipment cleaners: jobs and pay since 1914 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-7061

Chicago

Future History. "Vehicle and equipment cleaners: jobs and pay since 1914." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-7061.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_53_7061, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Vehicle and equipment cleaners: jobs and pay since 1914}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-7061}}, 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
1925195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Car Washer / Auto Laundry Attendant (hand and assembly-line era)
Known then as Car Wash Attendant (conveyor tunnel era)
Known then as Car Wash Worker / Auto Detailer (full-service and detailing era)
Known then as Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment (BLS SOC 53-7061)
Known today as Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment (BLS SOC 53-7061)
Projected to still be called Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment (BLS SOC 53-7061)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
380K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$35,830

≈ $34,911 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1914

Two Detroiters open the Automobile Laundry, widely credited as the first US business to take the name "car wash." It is a human assembly line: cars are pushed by hand through a shed and each worker soaps, scrubs, rinses, or dries at a fixed station, borrowing the division of labor from the automobile assembly lines being perfected nearby. A wash cost about $1.50 in the period, a substantial sum, marking the car as a luxury worth professional cleaning.

Beat · 1940

The first conveyor-driven car wash opens in Hollywood, California. A winch hooked to the bumper pulls each car through while attendants still soap, brush, and dry by hand. The conveyor does not replace the crew; it paces them, turning the wash into a steady production lane and setting the template for the tunnel format that follows.

Beat · 1946

A semi-automatic system debuts in the US combining a powered pulley conveyor, overhead sprinklers, hand-operated brushes, and an air-blower dryer, a format credited to Thomas Simpson. For the first time the machine handles the rinse and much of the dry, narrowing the attendant's job toward prep, hand-brushing, and finishing spots the sprinklers miss.

Beat · 1951

The Anderson brothers open in Seattle what is generally cited as the first fully automatic car wash, running soap, water, brushing, and drying through the cycle without a crew touching the car. Through the 1960s mechanized tunnels spread nationwide and Hanna Enterprises becomes the largest car-wash equipment maker in the world. The wash cycle is automated, but loading, prep, vacuum, wheels, and exit towel-dry keep the crew on the floor.

Beat · 2019

Professional car washing has become a mass-market habit. Where fewer than half of US drivers reported washing their vehicle at a professional wash in 1994, more than three-quarters did by 2019, driven by the spread of express exterior washes and unlimited monthly subscriptions. The demand growth helps explain why employment in the occupation kept rising even as each individual wash needed fewer labor-hours.

Beat · 2025

The robotics wave reaches the tasks the tunnel never automated. Confinity Robotics unveils the STAGS interior-cleaning gantry robot, reported to cut an interior vacuum crew from roughly ten workers to two, and AI-guided exterior wash arms and AI-driven car-wash sites begin limited US deployment. Even so, the beta sites still need human operators to monitor and oversee them, and the premium detailing work, paint correction, ceramic coating, leather and stain restoration, remains hand-and-eye work.

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 vehicle and equipment cleaners? 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
+3.9%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 53-7061 (Cleaners of vehicles and equipment): 419.5 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 435.8 thousand in 2035, a change of +16.3 thousand (+3.9%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (7.9% 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.
Frey & Osborne (2013), "The Future of Employment"
2013 study · Probability of computerisation (2013 model)
37%
probability
What this measures

Published appendix value for SOC 2010 53-7061 Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment: probability of computerisation 0.37, rank 256 of 702 (rank 1 is least computerisable). Frey and Osborne estimated in 2013, with a Gaussian-process classifier on O*NET variables, how likely the whole occupation is to be technically automatable over "some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two". It is a probability for the occupation, not a share of tasks and not a forecast of jobs lost.

Official statisticReport an error
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
0%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 53-7061.00 Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment. 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 0.083. 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 vehicle and equipment cleaners

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

AI is taking this onDrive customer vehicles within the facility or to and from service bays, operating wash tunnel entry controls, staging cars on conveyor belts, and directing the flow of vehicles through the wash queue.

Drive customer vehicles within the facility or to and from service bays, operating wash tunnel entry controls, staging cars on conveyor belts, and directing the flow of vehicles through the wash queue.[1],[3]

Where your edge is

Shift toward monitoring and maintaining automated wash systems rather than manual staging; learn basic PLC and sensor troubleshooting to stay valuable on the floor.

AI is sitting alongside you hereSchedule appointments, quote jobs, and track inventory of chemicals, pads, and supplies using detailing business management software, following up with customers for return visits.

Schedule appointments, quote jobs, and track inventory of chemicals, pads, and supplies using detailing business management software, following up with customers for return visits.[6],[7]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Own the customer relationship side of the business; workers who master CRM tools and upselling add-ons earn significantly more than hourly tunnel attendants.

AI is sitting alongside you hereWash, scrub, and pressure-spray vehicle exteriors using hand tools, foam cannons, and automated tunnel equipment, adapting water pressure and chemical mix to paint type and soil level.

Wash, scrub, and pressure-spray vehicle exteriors using hand tools, foam cannons, and automated tunnel equipment, adapting water pressure and chemical mix to paint type and soil level.[1],[3]

Where your edge is

Learn to operate and monitor robotic wash systems (tunnel controls, sensor calibration); certify through the International Carwash Association training programs.

Where vehicle and equipment cleaners go next

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

What each move takes

Vehicle cleaners already hold the core physical-cleaning and chemical-handling skills that building janitorial work requires; the transition is lateral in wages but opens up institutional employers (healthcare, education, government) with more stable hours and benefit packages.

What you'd add
  • · Floor-care equipment operation (burnishers, auto-scrubbers)
  • · ISSA Cleaning Industry Management Standard (CIMS) fundamentals
  • · Bloodborne pathogens and biohazard cleaning compliance
What it takesMost of your skills carry over
Tools of the era

How has the work of vehicle and equipment cleaners changed since 1914?

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

  • Hand wash assembly line (bucket, sponge, chamois, hand-push)

    The first car washes were not machines but a division of labor. At the 1914 Automobile Laundry in Detroit a car was pushed through a shed by hand and each worker did a single repeated task: soaping, scrubbing, rinsing, or drying with a chamois. The tool was the human arm organized like a factory line. Everything depended on the worker: water pressure was a hose, soil judgment was the eye, and the finish was whatever the towel left. This era defined the occupation as a station-based flow job before any equipment automated a step.

  • Conveyor (bumper winch pull-through, hand brushing)

    The first conveyor-driven wash appeared in Hollywood, California, in 1940. A winch hooked to the bumper pulled the car slowly through the shed while attendants still soaped, brushed, and dried by hand at their stations. The conveyor did not remove the worker; it set the pace of the worker. For the first time the line moved the car instead of a crew pushing it, which standardized throughput and turned the wash into a predictable production lane. The job became one of keeping up with the belt.

    Effect on the work

    The conveyor raised cars-per-hour and made staffing a function of belt speed rather than how fast a crew could push, but every wet step on the car remained manual.

  • Semi-automatic system (powered pulley, overhead sprinklers, blower dryer)

    In 1946 a semi-automatic wash debuted in the United States that combined an automatic pulley conveyor, overhead sprinklers to rinse, hand-operated brushes, and a powered air blower to dry. Thomas Simpson is credited with assembling this format. The machine now did the rinsing and much of the drying that workers had done by hand. The attendant's job narrowed toward the steps the machine could not yet do well: prep spraying the front and wheels, hand brushing dirty panels, and finishing spots the sprinklers missed.

    Effect on the work

    Mechanizing rinse and dry cut the number of hands needed per car and standardized the wash, pushing the human role toward prep and touch-up rather than the full hand-wash.

  • Fully automatic tunnel (automatic soap, water, brushes, dry)

    In 1951 the Anderson brothers (Archie, Dean, and Eldon) opened in Seattle what is generally cited as the first fully automatic car wash, applying soap, water, brushing, and drying without a crew touching the car through the cycle. Through the 1960s these mechanized tunnels spread nationwide and Hanna Enterprises became the largest car-wash equipment maker in the world. Recirculating water systems, soft-cloth friction washing, the roller-on-demand conveyor, and wraparound brushes followed. The worker's role consolidated into loading cars onto the conveyor, vacuuming and prepping, towel-drying the exit, and running the till.

    Effect on the work

    Full automation of the wash cycle removed most of the hand-washing labor per car, but the surviving full-service crew (load, prep, vacuum, wheels, exit towel-dry) kept the occupation large rather than eliminating it.

  • Touchless / brushless washing + full-service detailing trade

    High-pressure touchless (brushless) systems using stronger chemistry instead of friction spread through the 1980s and 1990s, marketed as gentler on paint, and ran alongside the soft-cloth tunnels. In the same decades the upmarket end of the trade professionalized into detailing: clay-bar decontamination, machine polishing and paint correction, interior shampoo and leather care, and paint sealants. This split the occupation in two. The tunnel attendant became a lower-paid, high-turnover loader and dryer, while the detailer became a skilled craftsperson selling a finish, with the eye to read paint and the hand to correct it commanding far higher pay.

    Effect on the work

    The detailing segment created a durable high-skill, higher-pay branch of the occupation that automation could not commoditize, while the tunnel segment stayed low-wage and volume-driven.

  • Express exterior model + scheduling, CRM, and inventory software

    The express exterior model, a fast conveyor wash bundled with free self-serve vacuums and sold by unlimited monthly subscription, became the dominant new-build format in the 2010s. It is deliberately lean on staff: a small crew loads cars, manages the queue with computerized point-of-sale, and maintains the equipment, while the customer vacuums their own interior. For independent and mobile detailers, business software such as OrbisX and Urable took over booking, quoting, invoicing, route planning, and chemical-inventory tracking, shifting part of the job from physical work to managing a customer relationship and a calendar.

    Effect on the work

    The express model lowered labor-hours per wash by replacing full-service crews with self-serve vacuums and subscription queuing, while CRM and scheduling software let solo detailers run higher job volume without an office manager.

  • AI-guided wash robotics + interior-cleaning gantry robots

    The newest wave aims robots at the steps the tunnel never automated. Confinity Robotics unveiled the STAGS stationary gantry robot in 2025, automating interior vacuuming, misting, and steam cleaning at around ten cars per hour and cutting an interior crew from roughly ten workers to two. AI-guided industrial robotic arms (for example Preen) wash, rinse, and dry exteriors with adaptive positioning, and AI-driven sites began opening in 2025. These systems target the highest-volume, most repetitive tasks: exterior wash and interior vacuum. They do not yet replace the trained-eye work of paint correction, ceramic coating, stain and leather restoration, or damage assessment, and the beta deployments still require human operators to monitor and oversee them.

    Effect on the work

    Early robotic deployments trim volume crews most where the work is repetitive, interior vacuuming and exterior wash, while the premium detailing and inspection tasks that reward judgment remain human; net effect on total 53-7061 headcount is not yet measurable.

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Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment employment and pay by year

On record since1914
Latest US employment380,430 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$35,830 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+3.9% 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 9226)

    Employment, 2025
    14,000, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14): employee jobs in SOC 9226 Vehicle valeters and cleaners, United Kingdom, 2025 (ASHE "number of jobs", thousands x1000; excludes self-employment). Open Government Licence v3.0.
    Median pay, 2025
    £24,875, 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 9226 Vehicle valeters and cleaners, United Kingdom, 2025. Open Government Licence v3.0.

  • Australia (ANZSCO 8111)

    Employment, 2025
    15,800, ABS Labour Force Survey Official statistic Report an errorABS Labour Force Survey (Detailed), table EQ08: employed persons in ANZSCO 8111 Car Detailers, national (summed across sex and state/territory), annual average of 4 quarterly estimates.
    Median pay, 2025
    A$64,480, ABS Employee Earnings May 2025 Official statistic Report an errorAnnualised (x52) from A$1,240 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 26 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
191420n/aEst., Michigan Public (Michigan Radio) Researched contextReport
196080,000n/aEst., Car wash Researched contextReport
1995230,000n/aEst., A brief history of American carwashing Researched contextReport
2003320,840$17,190BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
2004330,520$17,490BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
2005333,350$17,620BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
2006334,560$18,060BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
2007336,210$18,680BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
2008330,850$19,450BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
2009298,500$19,690BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
2010288,110$19,680BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
2011290,780$19,850BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
2012302,960$19,850BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
2013311,940$20,230BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
2014321,740$20,670BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015336,960$21,310BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016348,770$22,220BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017373,290$23,360BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018378,850$24,530BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019382,670$25,800BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020341,660$27,640BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021351,960$29,280BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022359,530$31,000BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023365,290$34,150BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024373,960$35,270BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025380,430$35,830BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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