Salary
Average Salary: $27,000
Expected Lifetime Earnings: $1,127,000
At least you won’t need to rummage through the trash to find your dinner. (For what it’s worth, you’ll still need to rummage through the trash.) The average annual salary for a sanitation worker is 35k (about $17 per hour). The top 10 percent of earners make around 57k. The bottom 10 percent make a pretty measly 20k.
Where you fall in that spectrum depends a lot on what state you’re working in. Sanitation workers in New York make an average 52k, the highest in the country, followed by Washington state, which pays an average of 50k per year. Stay away from South Dakota, where the lowest-paying sanitation jobs are.
What’s the very, very most you can make? One Sanitation Commissioner, John Doherty, cracks the 200k mark. Guess what city he works for? You guessed it! New York.