Keep freight, trucks and warehouses moving, and fix it when they stop.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Counsellors: send it to a student from your own email in one click.
The median pay is about $82,320 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $50,890 at the lower end to about $133,160 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
Up to 4 years after high school, on the usual route.
From nothing up to about $55,000, depending on the route, for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.
No. There is no license to hold, though many employers still ask for training or a certificate.
Good demand nationally, from government outlook data. Demand varies by region, so check your area.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$82,320
Bottom tenth
$50,890
Top tenth
$133,160
The federal wage survey has no code for coordinator. The closest line is logisticians, the people who plan and track how goods move: a 2025 median of $82,320, with the bottom tenth earning $50,890 or less and the top tenth $133,160 or more. Managers who run whole distribution operations are counted separately and earn more.
$50,890 to $64,440
The bottom tenth and bottom quarter of logisticians, 2025, the survey line closest to a coordinator job
Coordinator, dispatcher and planner jobs in a warehouse or freight office are the usual way in.
$82,440 to $146,770
The bottom quarter to the top quarter of transportation, storage and distribution managers, 2025
Running a distribution center or a transportation operation is the step the survey median describes. Getting there usually takes five to ten years, and it means owning a budget, a facility and a staff rather than just a shipping queue.
Roughly, all in
Nothing to $55,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is starting in a warehouse or on a dispatch desk straight out of high school and working up, which still happens and is why the figure is zero. The high end is a four year bachelor's degree in supply chain or business at in state public rates, plus a professional certification that employers very often pay for. Two years at a community college then transferring cuts the degree route roughly in half for the same qualification. The cheap door is real but slower, and it tends to close at the larger companies that screen for a degree.
File the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid). A Pell Grant does not get repaid, and a dependent undergraduate can borrow $5,500 in federal loans the first year and $31,000 across a whole degree. Two years at a community college then transferring is the cheapest honest route to the same bachelor's degree.
Bonuses tied to targets
On-time delivery, cost per unit shipped, inventory accuracy. Common at manager level and up.
Employer paid certification
Most large distributors will pay for supply chain credentials once you are in the door.
Office hours in a warehouse industry
Office conditions, next to the floor jobs around you.
It exists everywhere
Every manufacturer, retailer, hospital and grocery chain moves goods. This skill is not tied to one city or one employer.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
There are two honest routes in: from the warehouse floor, or through a degree.
High school diploma
Grade 12
Math and computer classes. Get genuinely good at spreadsheets, which is not a joke in this field.
Pick your entry
Right after school
Either take a warehouse, dispatch or customer service job now and learn the operation from inside, or go to college for a supply chain or business degree first.
Get the degree if you are going that way
2 to 4 years
A two-year associate degree in logistics or a four-year bachelor's in supply chain management. Internships during it matter more than your grades.
First coordinator role
1 to 3 years
Scheduling trucks, booking freight, chasing shipments, entering orders. Learn one operation properly before you try to run one.
Certify and move up
3 to 8 years in
Add a supply chain credential, take on a bigger site, then a manager title.
Math and statistics
Forecasting, inventory levels and cost per shipment are all arithmetic you do every day.
Computer and business software
Spreadsheets are the core tool of this job, at every level of it.
Business or economics
You are constantly trading cost against speed, and you need to understand why.
Geography
Knowing where things are, and how long it takes to get between them, is more useful here than in almost any other office job.
Nobody licenses logistics coordinators and no state exam stands between you and the job. What employers do read is professional certification. ASCM (the Association for Supply Chain Management) runs the best known credentials in planning, inventory and logistics, and CSCMP (the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals) runs another set. Two related jobs are genuinely licensed: a customs broker holds a federal license from Customs and Border Protection, and anyone driving the truck needs a CDL (commercial driver's license). Coordinating the freight needs neither.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Certified in Planning and Inventory Management
The ASCM (Association for Supply Chain Management) credential most manufacturers ask for by name.
Certified Supply Chain Professional
Broader, covering the whole chain rather than one plant. Aimed at people moving toward management.
Certified in Logistics, Transportation and Distribution
The transport and warehousing focused one, closest to this actual job.
Six Sigma training
Process improvement methods. Widely recognized and often paid for by the employer.
Serious spreadsheet skill
Pivot tables and lookups, not just typing numbers in. This alone separates candidates.
Experience with warehouse and transport software
The big enterprise systems run almost every distribution center in the country.
Forklift certification
Cheap, quick and it proves you understand the floor you are scheduling.
Spanish
Useful in a very large share of warehouses in this country.
This is a field where starting as an hourly warehouse worker is a normal and respected route to a management job. Plenty of distribution center managers began picking orders. The reason is that the job is about a physical operation, and you cannot schedule one convincingly if you have never worked in one. If college is not affordable right now, take the floor job, do it visibly well, and let an employer pay for the degree later.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
In by 7am ahead of the first trucks. Check what did not arrive overnight and what did not ship. Call a carrier about a driver who is running four hours late, move a delivery appointment, find space on another truck for what got bumped. Mid morning is order releases and paperwork. Afternoon is the customer who wants to know where their shipment is, the damaged pallet nobody wants to own, and tomorrow's plan. The work is exception handling: most of what goes right never reaches your desk.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Standard shipping containers arrived in the 1950s and collapsed the cost of moving goods between countries. Much of what is in your room traveled inside one. The whole modern logistics job exists because of that box.
When dozens of container ships queued off Los Angeles and Long Beach waiting to unload, supply chain became a phrase on the evening news.
For retail logistics, the weeks before the winter holidays carry a huge share of the year's volume. Plans for it are locked months ahead, extra staff are hired, and time off is usually blocked. It is the part of the calendar everyone in the field organizes their life around.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Logistics first, then the rest of the field. See every career in transport.
Last checked October 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in United States dollars, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published pay scales. They vary by state, employer and experience. Tuition is for in-state students at public schools unless the card says otherwise. How every figure on this site is sourced and checked.
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