How much do rail-track laying and maintenance equipment operators make in Texas?

The median wage for rail-track laying and maintenance equipment operators in Texas is $56,470 a year, or $27.15 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 rail-track laying and maintenance equipment operators in Texas is $58,990 a year. The median is $56,470.

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 $27.15. At a full-time year that lines up with about $56,470 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 Texas, the lowest-paid 10% of rail-track laying and maintenance equipment operators earn under $43,460 a year and a quarter earn under $47,580 ($20.89 and $22.87 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 rail-track laying and maintenance equipment operators in Texas spans from $43,460 for the bottom 10% to $70,910 for top earners.

The middle 50% earn between $47,580 and $70,630 a year, with the overall median at $56,470.

On the median wage of $56,470, a single filer taking the 2026 standard deduction keeps an estimated $47,554 a year, or roughly $3,963 a month.

That is after federal and FICA tax, an effective rate of 15.8%.

Texas levies no state income tax on wages, so nothing is withheld for it.

On the median annual salary of $56,470, estimated take-home pay is roughly $3,963 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 $1,829 net.

No. The median in Texas is 19.4% below the national median of $70,070.

Nominal pay is only half the comparison: prices in Texas sit at 97.1 against a national 100, so the gap in what the money buys is different from the gap in the salary.

It is 0.72 times the median household income of $78,476. A household often has more than one earner, so a single salary at this level goes further than the ratio alone suggests.

Prices in Texas run at 97.1 against a national average of 100, with rents at 96.5, so $56,470 here buys about what $58,182 buys at national average prices.

The top tenth earn $70,910 a year or more. The 10th-percentile wage is $43,460.

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

The survey counted 940 of these jobs in Texas for May 2025.

That makes the occupation 47% less concentrated here than in the country as a whole. It counts wage and salary jobs, so the self-employed are outside it.