Truck Driver Salary in Illinois: Pay by Experience, City & Take-Home

A truck driver in Illinois earns a median of $60,320 a year, or about $29.00 an hour, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025). Most drivers in the state land between $39,710 at the 10th percentile and $86,300 at the 90th. That median sits above the national figure of $58,640, so Illinois is a solid state to hold a CDL.

How Illinois truck driver pay compares to the national median

Illinois pays its truck drivers more than the country as a whole. The state median of $60,320 runs $1,680 above the national median of $58,640, according to BLS (2025). That gap is modest in percentage terms, roughly 2.9 percent, but it points the same direction as the state’s larger numbers across the board.

The state mean, which gets pulled up by the highest earners, is $62,430. When the mean sits above the median like that, it tells you a chunk of drivers in Illinois are earning well into the $70,000s and $80,000s, mostly long-haul, specialized freight, and senior union drivers in the Chicago area. The 75th percentile is $75,600 and the 90th reaches $86,300, so the ceiling for an experienced driver here is real.

The floor matters too. The 10th percentile is $39,710, which is roughly what a new driver or a regional part-timer takes in before building seniority. The spread from $39,710 to $86,300 is wide for a single occupation, and almost all of that range comes down to experience, the type of freight you haul, and whether you run local, regional, or over-the-road.

Put another way, the difference between the bottom and the top of the Illinois range is $46,590 a year. Very few occupations show a spread that wide on a single skill set, and it explains why two drivers can both call themselves truck drivers and earn pay that’s almost double apart. The state median of $60,320 is also a useful sanity check against any single job offer: if a carrier in Illinois is quoting you a number well below the 25th percentile of $48,550 for full-time, year-round work, you have data to push back with. The percentiles here are the same ones the BLS (2025) publishes, so they reflect what real Illinois drivers actually reported, not a recruiter’s estimate.

Truck driver salary in Illinois by experience

Experience is the single biggest lever on a driver’s pay. A first-year driver with a fresh CDL earns near the bottom of the range. Add a few years, a clean record, and endorsements like hazmat or tanker, and you move up the percentiles fast. The table below maps the BLS (2025) percentiles to the experience stages they usually represent in Illinois.

The jump from entry to median is about $20,610 a year, and most drivers cover that ground inside their first three to five years. The move from median to the 75th percentile is another $15,280, which usually means moving into dedicated lanes, hazmat or tanker freight, or a senior spot at a carrier that pays by the mile at a higher cents-per-mile rate. The hourly figures here are approximations from the annual numbers for comparison, since most over-the-road work pays by the mile rather than the clock.

Two things separate a $48,550 driver from a $75,600 driver in Illinois. The first is endorsements. A hazmat or tanker endorsement opens up freight that pays more because fewer drivers qualify to haul it. The second is the kind of operation. A local driver home every night often earns less per year than an over-the-road driver running long lanes, simply because the OTR driver logs more paid miles. Neither path is wrong, but the pay difference is built into the percentile spread above.

It helps to think of the table as a timeline rather than five fixed tiers. A driver who starts at $39,710 and runs clean for a couple of years usually clears the 25th percentile of $48,550 without doing anything exotic, just by gaining the experience carriers pay for and qualifying for better lanes. Reaching the median of $60,320 is the point where most full-time Illinois drivers settle in. Getting above it, into the $75,600 experienced tier and the $86,300 senior tier, is where the deliberate choices come in: chasing endorsements, taking the harder freight, and sticking with one carrier long enough to climb its seniority scale. The pay is there in the data, but the top of the range rewards drivers who treat it as a career rather than a job.

Truck driver pay by Illinois metro

Where you base out of changes the math. Chicago anchors the state both for pay and for sheer number of jobs, while downstate metros run lower medians that often pair with much cheaper housing. Here are the five largest Illinois metros for truck drivers by employment, with their median pay from BLS (2025).

Chicago is the obvious center of gravity. With 62,210 drivers employed, it holds the large majority of the state’s 84,200 trucking jobs, and at $62,300 it pays the highest median of any Illinois metro. That makes sense: it’s a national freight hub with rail yards, intermodal terminals, and warehouses feeding the whole Midwest, so demand for drivers and the freight rates behind their pay both run high.

Rockford at $59,900 and Decatur at $59,100 sit close behind, within a few hundred dollars of the statewide median. Bloomington comes in at $54,610 and Peoria at $49,610, the lowest of the five. But a lower median downstate does not automatically mean a worse deal. Housing in Peoria or Decatur costs far less than in the Chicago suburbs, so a $54,610 paycheck downstate can leave more in your pocket after rent than a $62,300 paycheck in Cook County. That’s the housing-adjusted math we get into in the take-home section.

The pay spread across these metros is narrower than you might expect. From Peoria at $49,610 to Chicago at $62,300 is a difference of $12,690, which is large in absolute terms but tells you that even the lowest-paying large metro in Illinois sits within a reasonable distance of the state median. For comparison, Chicago’s $62,300 metro median runs $1,980 above the statewide median of $60,320, while Peoria runs $10,710 below it. Decatur is worth a second look for its size: with only 990 drivers employed it’s the smallest of the five metros listed, yet it still posts a $59,100 median, close to Rockford’s. That suggests the freight moving through central Illinois, much of it agricultural and industrial, supports pay above what a small metro might otherwise carry.

If you’re choosing where to base, weigh three things together: the metro median, the number of jobs, and local housing. Chicago wins on the first two by a wide margin and loses on the third. Rockford and Decatur give up only a few hundred dollars of median pay while sitting in much cheaper housing markets. Peoria’s lower $49,610 median is the trade-off for the cheapest cost of living among the five. None of these is a bad place to drive; they just reward different priorities.

Take-home pay after tax for Illinois truck drivers

Gross salary is not what hits your bank account. Illinois charges a flat state income tax, and federal income tax plus FICA come out on top of that. The table below breaks down take-home at four points across the range, from an entry driver at the 10th percentile to a senior driver at the 90th, using the 2026 tax-year estimates in our data.

A median Illinois driver earning $60,320 keeps $47,520 after federal, FICA, and state tax, an effective rate of about 21.2 percent. That works out to $3,960 a month. An entry driver at $39,710 nets $31,980, or $2,665 a month, at a lower effective rate of 19.5 percent. At the top, a senior driver grossing $86,300 takes home $64,826, about $5,402 a month, with the effective rate climbing to 24.9 percent as more income lands in higher federal brackets.

Notice how the effective rate climbs as gross pay rises. The entry driver pays 19.5 percent, the median driver 21.2 percent, the experienced driver 23.5 percent, and the senior driver 24.9 percent. That’s the federal progressive brackets at work; Illinois itself charges a flat rate, so the state line grows roughly in proportion to income while the federal line grows faster. In dollar terms, the state tax runs from $1,966 at the entry level to $4,272 at the senior level. FICA, the Social Security and Medicare withholding, is the one piece that scales almost linearly with pay, from $3,038 at p10 to $6,602 at p90. Knowing which slice is which helps when you’re reading your own pay stub and wondering where the money went.

Now the cross-state comparison that matters most. Illinois taxes income at a flat rate, and a no-tax state does not. Take the same median driver. In Illinois, $60,320 nets $47,520. In Texas, where there’s no state income tax, that same gross nets $50,506. That’s a gap of $2,986 a year, the exact amount the Illinois driver pays in state tax. So a Texas driver on identical gross pay keeps $2,986 more, purely because of state income tax.

Before you read that as a reason to move, finish the math. The number that actually matters is net pay minus local housing, not net pay alone. Chicago-area rent runs higher than most Texas metros, but downstate Illinois cities like Peoria, Decatur, and Bloomington are cheap, and a lower cost of living there can wipe out that $2,986 tax gap and then some. Run your own gross through the Illinois paycheck calculator to see your real net, then subtract what you’d actually pay for housing in the metro you’d drive out of. If you want help filing accurately on driver pay, including per-diem and multi-state miles, TurboTax walks through it step by step.

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How to earn more as a truck driver in Illinois

The percentile spread above is your roadmap. Moving from the median to the 75th percentile is worth $15,280 a year in Illinois, and the drivers who make that jump tend to do a handful of concrete things.

• Add endorsements. A hazmat or tanker endorsement on your CDL opens freight that fewer drivers can legally haul, and scarce supply pushes pay toward the $75,600 and up tier.
• Move into specialized or dedicated freight. Flatbed, oversize, and dedicated lanes typically pay a higher cents-per-mile rate than dry van, which lifts annual pay even on similar miles.
• Go over-the-road if you can. OTR drivers log more paid miles than local drivers home every night, and miles are what fill the gap between the 25th and 75th percentiles.
• Base near Chicago. At a $62,300 metro median, the Chicago hub pays the most in the state and has by far the most openings, with 62,210 driver jobs.
• Build a clean record and seniority. Carriers and union shops pay tenured drivers with no accidents and no violations at the top of their scale, which is how drivers reach the $86,300 90th percentile.
• Stack credentials. Logistics, dispatch, and safety coursework on a platform like Coursera can move you toward dispatcher, trainer, or owner-operator roles that pay above a seat-only driver.

To put a number on why this is worth the effort: the move from the 25th percentile to the median is $11,770 a year in Illinois, and the move from the median to the 75th percentile is another $15,280. Reaching the 90th percentile of $86,300 from the median means closing a $25,980 gap. Those are the prizes the steps above are aimed at. Most drivers won’t sprint to the top in a year, but the data shows the ceiling is real and that experienced Illinois drivers genuinely earn it. One practical sequence works for a lot of people: get hired and run clean to clear probation, add an endorsement in your first year, move to dedicated or specialized freight by year two or three, and use seniority and a spotless record to negotiate at renewal. Each step maps to a measurable jump on the percentile table above.

Job outlook for truck drivers in Illinois

Trucking is one of the largest occupations in the state. Illinois employs 84,200 truck drivers, according to BLS (2025), and 62,210 of them, nearly three in four, work in the Chicago metro. That concentration follows the freight. Chicago is one of the busiest inland freight hubs in the country, tying together rail, intermodal, and warehouse distribution for the Midwest, and that keeps steady demand under driver pay.

For anyone holding or chasing a CDL in Illinois, the takeaway is straightforward. The jobs exist in volume, the median beats the national figure, and the path from entry pay to experienced pay is well worn. To see current openings and pay ranges by lane and metro, browse listings on ZipRecruiter.

Truck driver pay in nearby states

Pay varies a lot by state. If you’re weighing Illinois against where you might drive, these pages run the same breakdown for the national picture and for other large states.

Illinois truck driver salary FAQ

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS 2025 (wages and employment); ThePayGuide 2026 tax-year take-home estimates. Last updated 2026. See our methodology.