How much does a forklift operator make in New Mexico?

The median wage for forklift operators in New Mexico is $62,150 a year, or $29.88 an hour.

Half earn more than that and half earn less. The figure comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational wage survey for May 2025.

BLS’s mean (average) wage for forklift operators in New Mexico is $53,290 a year. The median is $62,150.

The mean sits higher when a smaller group of high earners pulls the average up. For a typical paycheck, the median is the better middle.

The median hourly wage is $29.88. At a full-time year that lines up with about $62,150 a year.

BLS May 2025; hourly and annual figures come from the same survey.

BLS does not publish starting pay. The closest figure it does publish is the low end of the range: in New Mexico, the lowest-paid 10% of forklift operators earn under $35,900 a year and a quarter earn under $39,840 ($17.26 and $19.15 an hour).

New hires often start somewhere in that band, but the May 2025 survey does not record experience, so read it as a floor to compare an offer against rather than a typical first salary.

The overall salary range for forklift operators in New Mexico spans from $35,900 for the bottom 10% to $65,090 for top earners.

The middle 50% earn between $39,840 and $62,150 a year, with the overall median at $62,150.

On the median wage of $62,150, a single filer taking the 2026 standard deduction keeps an estimated $50,346 a year, or roughly $4,195 a month.

That is after federal, state and FICA tax, an effective rate of 19%.

New Mexico takes $1,772 of it in state income tax.

On the median annual salary of $62,150, estimated take-home pay is roughly $4,195 a month after federal, state, and FICA taxes.

For workers paid on a standard biweekly schedule (26 pay periods per year), each paycheck is approximately $1,936 net.

Yes. The median in New Mexico is 33.9% above the national median of $46,420.

Nominal pay is only half the comparison: prices in New Mexico sit at 92.2 against a national 100, so the gap in what the money buys is different from the gap in the salary.

It is 0.97 times the median household income of $64,059. A household often has more than one earner, so a single salary at this level goes further than the ratio alone suggests.

Prices in New Mexico run at 92.2 against a national average of 100, with rents at 73.6, so $62,150 here buys about what $67,399 buys at national average prices.

The top tenth earn $65,090 a year or more. The 10th-percentile wage is $35,900.

Experience, specialty, employer and the part of New Mexico someone works in all move a wage inside that range; the survey reports the spread, not the reason for it.

The survey counted 2,620 of these jobs in New Mexico for May 2025.

That makes the occupation 40% less concentrated here than in the country as a whole. It counts wage and salary jobs, so the self-employed are outside it.