US Logistics Hiring in 2026: 3 Candidates per Posted Role

Median posted pay runs from $34,000 for expediters to $175,000 for supply chain directors, a spread of about 415% across 24 roles. That is the widest role table in this series, and it is wide because the industry is two labor markets under one name. Planning and leadership sit at the top: supply chain directors at $175,000, supply chain managers at $125,000, supply planners at $80,000, demand planners at $79,250 and supply chain analysts at $77,800. Licensed driving sits with them rather than below them. Truck drivers with a CDL carry a median of $75,920, ahead of transportation managers at $72,650 and logistics analysts at $70,304, and 30% above the market median. The floor is the warehouse and the dispatch desk: delivery drivers at $42,640, warehouse associates at $42,619, forklift operators at $42,380, material handlers at $42,057 and expediters at $34,000. Delivery driving and long-haul driving are separate rows in this table for the first time, and the gap between them is 1.8x. The feed carries no posting count per role, so treat the exact ordering as directional.

Washington leads states at $62,120, ahead of New York at $60,546, Colorado at $60,080 and Minnesota at $59,380. Florida is lowest at $52,680, Ohio next at $53,200, and the whole state spread is 17.9%, the narrowest geography in this series. Cities spread a little wider at 26.8%. Denver tops them at $62,520, then New York at $62,500, San Diego at $61,793 and Minneapolis at $60,900, with Orlando lowest at $49,320. Read these figures against each other and not against the market median at the top of this report. The geographic cut is computed on a capped base, at most 20 postings for any one employer and title inside a state, which stops a single high-volume employer setting the median for a whole state. That cap makes the states comparable with each other and leaves them on a different base from the headline figure. No cut here carries a posting count, so read all of it as directional.

The posted median opens the year at $65,000 in January and closes at $56,160 in August, a fall of 13.6% across the eight months on record. The decline is steady rather than sharp: $60,000 in February, $58,240 in March, $55,380 in April, a small recovery to $58,084 in May, then $57,949 in June and $56,949 in July. Posting volume tells a different story from pay. June is the heaviest month at 13,535 postings and March close behind at 12,497, while January carries only 1,216. May (3,928) and August (3,911) are both thin. The May trough has now appeared in eight consecutive pulls across every industry we measure, so it is a property of the collection window rather than a fact about hiring, and the same caution applies to the final month of any series. Every month in this report clears the disclosure floor, so nothing is suppressed.

Two figures in this section come from Glozo data that public salary sources do not publish. Against 198,856 job postings, the feed carries a measured talent pool of 617,330 logistics and supply chain professionals in the United States. Divide one by the other and there are about 3.1 available professionals for every posted role. That is a supply-side measurement, and it is the number most discussions of this industry are missing: the published work on logistics hiring is built on employer surveys and long-range projections rather than on a count of who is actually out there. It describes everyone carrying a logistics or supply chain title, not the licensed or certified subset, and the two are not the same population. The skills section below prices that distinction. Postings clear in 13.4 days on average, the longest in this series. Expediters stay open longest at 14.6 days, then warehouse associates at 14.3 and shipping and receiving clerks at 14.2. Supply chain analysts close fastest at 8.4 days, with inventory analysts at 10.3 and supply chain managers at 10.6. For the first time in this series pay and time to fill do move together, and the direction is downward: Pearson correlation across all 24 roles is -0.535, -0.499 without the longest-running role and -0.619 without the highest paid, so the relationship does not rest on one outlier. The roles that sit open are the ones at the bottom of the pay table.

Full-time work is 88.2% of postings, part-time 5.5% and internships 4.5%. Contract (1.2%) and temporary (0.6%) are both small, and that is a property of this sample rather than of the industry: staffing agencies are excluded from the data set, and agencies are the main channel for temporary warehouse and driving work. Read the contract and temporary shares as a floor. The internship share is larger than it looks from the label. Carriers use it for entry routes aimed at driving school graduates rather than for student placements, which is why it sits above contract and temporary in an industry that has little classroom recruiting.

Certifications are priced above software in this market, and the gap is not close. CPIM leads at 33.2%, about $19,336 on the market median, then CLTD at 31.4%, sales and operations planning at 28.9%, SQL at 26.7% and demand forecasting at 21.8%. The certified supply chain professional credential adds 20.7%. At the other end sit the tools every job description asks for: transportation management systems at 5.4%, SAP at 4.1% and Microsoft Excel at 1.8%, which is inside the noise. A named ERP is worth less than a tenth of a planning credential here. This is the second market in this series where the credential outprices the tool, after accounting, and both are outside the technical industries where the ranking runs the other way.

The measured pool is 617,330 people. Specialists are 74.0% of it, 456,926 professionals, which is the most top-heavy middle in this series. Leaders are 9.4% (57,828), entry level 8.4% (52,157) and experts 8.2% (50,419). The entry layer is worth comparing with the technical markets we measure, where it runs between 1.6% and 2.1%: at 8.4% this industry has a genuine junior layer, though a shallower one than accounting. One caution on reading the grades. The share of leaders in the pool and the share of leadership roles in the vacancy table are not comparable quantities. Profiles carry director-level titles far more often than director-level vacancies get posted, which is why a single leadership row in the role table sits alongside a 9.4% leader share here.

Median weekly earnings in transportation and material moving occupations are $977 for men and $775 for women, a gap of 20.7%. The national figure for the same quarter is 18.0%, so the gap in this occupation group is wider than the gap across all US occupations by about 2.6 percentage points. Both figures come from the same Bureau of Labor Statistics release for the second quarter of 2026 and both are unadjusted for seasonality, the occupation row from table 4 and the national row from table 2. These are Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for the occupation group, not Glozo measurements, and they cover full-time wage and salary workers rather than posted salaries.