Hard physical work on a drilling or well service rig, two weeks on and two weeks off. No degree needed, and the risk is real.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$58,160
New hand
$38,940
Top tenth
$97,560
These figures are for service unit operators in oil and gas, one of several rig jobs the survey counts separately: the median is $58,160 a year and the bottom tenth near $38,940. Derrick operators and rotary drill operators have their own codes at broadly similar money. Offshore work and the big shale basins pay well above this, and a slow year can pay nothing at all.
$20 to $28 an hour
Entry hand on a land rig, plus overtime
The hourly rate is only half the story. Rig hands work 12-hour shifts for 14 days straight, so the overtime is where the money is. A busy year can put a new hand well past the base figure. A quiet year can put them out of work.
$90,000 and up
Drillers, offshore hands and toolpushers
Offshore rigs in the Gulf of Mexico pay a premium for the isolation and the risk, often with three weeks on and three weeks off. Working up to driller, the person who actually runs the rig floor, is the biggest single pay jump on the crew.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
There is no tuition at all here and you are paid from your first shift. The low end is a company that pays for your safety tickets, the hydrogen sulfide awareness course, first aid and the rig orientation, and issues the fire resistant coveralls, boots and hard hat. The high end is paying for those tickets yourself at 300 to 1,000 dollars, buying your own gear at 300 to 600 dollars, and adding a commercial driver's license at 3,000 to 8,000 dollars to reach the better paid truck and pump work. The real cost that is not in these numbers is moving yourself to the oilfield, which usually means Texas, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma or the Gulf coast.
This is one of the few careers on this site with no tuition at all. You are paid from your first shift, and the main cost is getting yourself to the oilfield, which usually means Texas, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma or the Gulf coast.
Rotation schedules
Typically 14 days on and 14 off onshore, or 21 and 21 offshore. Half the year at home is the real benefit.
Camp, food and travel
Remote jobs cover housing and meals, and often a travel allowance to the site.
Overtime and bonuses
Long shifts mean heavy overtime, and some companies pay well-completion or safety bonuses on top.
Health insurance and a retirement plan
Standard at the large drilling contractors, patchier at small service companies.
No student debt
You start earning at eighteen while your friends are borrowing for tuition.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Hired for your willingness first, trained on the rig, promoted by proving you can be trusted with expensive equipment.
High school diploma
Grade 12
Usual but not always required. Shop, welding and math classes help. So does anything that proves you show up on time.
Safety tickets and a medical
Days to weeks
A rig safety orientation, hydrogen sulfide awareness, first aid and a drug test. Some are done in a day, some the employer pays for on hire.
Get hired as a roustabout or floorhand
Immediate
The bottom of the crew: moving pipe, cleaning, handling tools, doing what the driller says. Go to where the rigs are and apply in person.
Work up the crew
3 to 8 years
Floorhand to motorhand to derrickhand to driller. Each step is more skill, more responsibility and more money, learned on the job.
Well control certification
Before you run the floor
Drillers and supervisors need certified well control training, for example the WellSharp program run by IADC (the International Association of Drilling Contractors), renewed every two years.
Shop and welding
Fixing things with what is on the rig is a daily skill.
Math
Volumes, pressures and mud weights are simple arithmetic done correctly under time pressure.
Physical education
Say what you like, the job is lifting, climbing and pulling for twelve hours.
Physics
Pressure, load and leverage explain most of what the rig is doing.
There is no license to be a rig hand. What is regulated is the workplace. Onshore, federal workplace safety rules cover the site and the contractor has to train you on the hazards before you start. Offshore, BSEE (the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement) regulates safety and environmental protection on the outer continental shelf, and requires operators to run a formal safety and environmental management system. Industry bodies add their own standards on top: rig orientation programs and well control certifications are effectively required by employers even though no law names them.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Well control certification
Required before you can be a driller or supervisor. The single most valuable card in the wallet.
CDL (commercial driver's license)
Opens up vacuum trucks, pump trucks and hot oil work, which pay more and are less brutal on the body.
Welding
A rig welder is a different pay grade, and the skill works anywhere if the oilfield goes quiet.
Crane and rigging certification
Offshore and on big land rigs, certified crane operators and riggers are always short.
Offshore survival training
Helicopter underwater escape and sea survival. Required before you set foot on an offshore platform.
A reliable vehicle
Rigs are an hour or more from the nearest town and nobody is coming to get you.
Somewhere cheap to live
Rent in a boom town can eat the pay rise that brought you there.
A clean record
Drug testing is constant and random, and a failed test ends the job on the spot.
Money discipline
This career pays in waves. The people who last are the ones who save during the boom.
Very few people spend thirty years on a rig floor. The body gives out and the work moves with the price of oil. The usual exits are sideways into the same industry: well site supervisor, safety officer, equipment sales, wireline or coiled tubing, or an office job with the drilling contractor. The rig experience is the credential for all of it. Others take the welding, crane or commercial driving skills straight into construction, mining or trucking, which is why those tickets are worth getting while someone else is paying.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Twelve hours, days or nights, in whatever weather West Texas or North Dakota is having. Pre-shift safety meeting, then the work: making up and breaking out drill pipe, handling tongs and slips, mixing mud, hosing down the floor, greasing everything. Noise so constant you talk in hand signals. Lunch out of a cooler. The rig never stops, so the other crew takes over the second you step off. Then a trailer or a camp bed, sleep, and do it again for thirteen more days.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Drilling runs 24 hours a day because stopping is expensive and dangerous. Crews work in shifts the industry still calls tours, pronounced towers, and two crews hand the rig back and forth without it ever going quiet.
The Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, killing eleven workers and spilling oil for months. The federal offshore regulator was broken up and rebuilt afterwards, which is why the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement exists as a separate agency today.
A crew still has a roughneck on the floor, a derrickhand up the tower, a motorhand on the engines and a driller running all of them, with a toolpusher over the whole rig. The names come from the 1800s and have outlasted almost every piece of equipment they described.
Hydrogen sulfide, the gas that comes up with sour crude, smells like rotten eggs at low concentrations and destroys your sense of smell at high ones, so the warning disappears exactly when it matters. Every hand carries a monitor and every rig trains for it.
Last checked September 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.