As the school year got underway in August and September, school districts throughout the country once again faced a daunting challenge: severe bus driver shortages. For instance, the St. Louis Public School District had to cobble together a transportation plan that included Metro bus rides and private cab companies after the district’s primary bus driver vendor declined to renew its contract due to insufficient pay. Meanwhile, a city in Ohio responded to the shortages by eliminating bus routes for students living within a two-mile radius of its school, forcing many elementary and middle school students to walk to class.

We documented this problem last year, describing how excessively low pay and the particularly acute health risks facing this disproportionately older workforce during the pandemic have led to massive declines in bus driver employment. Unfortunately, since last fall, the situation has hardly improved. Some aspects of the problem, such as pay for drivers, have become even more dire.

Bus driver employment grew last year, but remains woefully inadequate

Because school bus drivers tend to be significantly older than the typical U.S. worker, they are more vulnerable to the health effects of COVID-19. As such, the onset of the pandemic drove many workers to leave the profession, and school districts have struggled to replace them.

Figure A shows the sharp decline in employment during the pandemic, but also highlights how school bus driver employment continues to be far below pre-pandemic levels. The total number of school bus drivers in September 2024 (approximately 199,000) was up 3.5% relative to the same point in 2023. Yet, it was still 12.2% lower than it was in September 2019. Breaking this total into its component parts: Private school bus driver employment (those at private schools or working at private companies contracted by public school districts) declined 12.2% from 43,300 to around 38,000, and publicly employed school bus drivers (those employed directly by the state or local government) declined 11.8% from 181,200 to 159,800 over the same period.1

Figure A also shows that school bus driver employment has generally been falling for 15 years. Austerity and budget cuts beginning in the early 2010s forced many school districts to cut bus service and/or privatize bus driver employment. When the school year started in fall of 2019, there were roughly 63,000 fewer bus drivers working in elementary and secondary schools than there had been in the fall of 2009—a nearly 22% decline in the decade following the Great Recession.

Over the same period, student enrollment at public K–12 schools grew by 1.4 million. Like other public education workers, public school bus drivers are being asked to do more with less overall capacity. When fewer bus drivers must pick up more students, it means longer routes, earlier morning pick-ups, and later drop-offs. These burdensome logistics can increase the likelihood of a student missing school time and diminish their chances of participating in other activities, not to mention the additional burden they can place on parents trying to coordinate work schedules.

Bus drivers are paid dismal wages, and the strong post-pandemic economy hasn’t helped

With the immediate health risks of the COVID-19 pandemic largely past, the key issue fueling bus driver staffing shortages today is low pay. School bus driver wages are far lower than most other workers, according to our analysis of Current Population Survey (CPS) microdata. In 2023, the median school bus driver earned $20.11 an hour, 20% less than the median wage for all workers in the economy ($25.21).2

Compounding the problem, the average public school bus driver works about 32 hours per week, meaning that the weekly wages for bus drivers are even lower than the hourly wage implies.3 School bus drivers often are not full-time employees and instead work a “split-shift” schedule coinciding with the beginning and end of the school day. Figure B shows that the median school bus driver earned $565 in weekly wages in 2023, approximately 43% less than the median weekly wage for all workers ($990). Just as alarming is that weekly earnings for bus drivers have actually fallen by nearly $20 a week, after adjusting for inflation, since 2019. With such low earnings, it is not surprising that bus drivers experience poverty at noticeably higher rates (6.4%) than U.S. workers overall (4.6%).

In the decade leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, school bus driver wages grew more slowly than typical wages throughout the overall economy. Figure C shows that real hourly wages for the median U.S. worker grew 4.1% between 2009 and 2019, while growth was only 2.4% for school bus drivers. During the same period, weekly wage growth for school bus drivers (5.2%) lagged growth in the overall median (5.7%), but more modestly. This is because school bus driver hours grew over the decade, presumably because employment decreases and student enrollment increases required more hours of work to be filled by fewer workers.

Unfortunately, since the COVID-19 pandemic and the huge losses it caused in bus driver employment, growth in bus driver hourly pay has trailed the sizable wage gains that many other lower-paying occupations have enjoyed over the last few years. After accounting for inflation, school bus driver hourly wages have grown 4.2% since 2019, compared with 4.4% growth for workers overall. As already noted, weekly earnings for bus drivers fell 2.8% since 2019, in contrast to a 5.0% increase in weekly wages for workers in the economy overall.

School districts need adequate funding to pay drivers

School districts will need to substantially raise pay and consider other ways of making bus driver jobs more attractive in order to recruit new workers. However, the United States suffers from a chronic underfunding of public schools, and many districts across the country are facing increased pressure as pandemic-era supports from the federal government are ending this year, such as the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund. Stronger permanent funding, and increased wages for drivers, are needed to solve the shortage and reverse these patterns.

Improving bus driver jobs and solving staffing shortages are not only important for the welfare and success of students, but also for advancing racial and gender equity. School bus drivers are disproportionately Black and women workers, which reflects the public sector historically offering more equitable opportunities for women and people of color.

Safe, reliable school bus service is critical for students, workers, and communities

As long-term declines in funding for public schools generate a cascade of damaging consequences for students, their families, and their broader communities, it is particularly important to have services as basic as bus transportation functioning effectively. Roughly half of school children rely on bus services to get to school. Reduced and unstable bus services cause school delays, disrupt learning time, and contribute to absenteeism.

The impact of worsening public school bus systems goes beyond just the immediate effects on children. When school transportation is transformed from a public service that every family can use to a private responsibility, some families—and especially low-income families—will have a much harder time finding a workable alternative. Many may not have easy access to a vehicle, they may have other care responsibilities, or their jobs may not be flexible enough to allow them time to provide transportation for their children. Moreover, as more parents drive their children to school, everyone on the road faces increased traffic during rush hours, and this increase in car emissions harms air quality and adds to the worsening effects of climate change.

The current bus driver shortage is a result of more than a decade of disinvestment in these workers and reflects a broader trend of underfunding public schools. The unfair burden of these disruptions is most damaging to the education and well-being of the students who need it the most, particularly those from low-income families.

Notes

1. The data in Figure A are restricted to bus drivers reporting that they work in elementary and secondary schools. This classification leaves out a significant number of school bus drivers but is the only way to examine trends in school bus driver employment before 2018. Prior to 2018, there was only a single Census Occupation Classification code for bus drivers, with no differentiation between school bus drivers and other types of bus drivers. The 2018 codes added separate Census codes for school bus drivers and “transit and intercity” bus drivers. With the updated classification, we can identify that around 33% of school bus drivers do not work in the elementary and secondary school industry. In the appendix table of our blog post on this topic last year, it shows that the majority of these school bus drivers work in “bus service and urban transit.” In 2019, there were more than 106,000 school bus drivers employed in “bus service and urban transit,” around 30% of the total number of school bus drivers. Unlike school bus drivers in elementary and secondary schools, “bus service and urban transit” school bus drivers are more likely to be private-sector workers. In 2019, 83.5% of these workers were in the private sector, compared with 17.4% of school bus drivers classified in elementary and secondary schools. “Bus service and urban transit” school bus driver employment was also significantly harmed by the pandemic. From 2019 to 2021, employment for this subset of school bus drivers fell 18.7%, compared with 16.5% for all school bus drivers.

2. These are three-year averages (2021–2023) of CPS Outgoing Rotation Group microdata. Throughout this analysis, we use three-year averages when measuring wages due to relatively small bus driver sample sizes.

3. EPI analysis of Current Population Survey 2021⁠–2023 microdata.