Parts Advisor Salary 2026,
What Parts Advisors Actually Earn

How much do parts advisors make in 2026?

Parts advisors are counted in the BLS parts salespersons series: OEWS May 2025 gives SOC 41-2022 a national median of $38,630 a year ($18.57 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $28,240 and the top 10% at $62,890 across 270,070 workers. Most discussion of this role assumes a car dealership, but the code covers parts counters across heavy truck, agricultural equipment, construction equipment, marine and industrial distribution as well — and those sectors pay better. The reason is downtime cost. A parked car is an inconvenience; a parked combine during harvest, a truck out of service or a stopped production line costs the customer serious money by the hour, so the parts operation is treated as critical rather than as a retail function, and the people who staff it are expected to know complex equipment and are paid accordingly. Agricultural and construction equipment dealers in particular run extended hours during the working season and rely on parts staff who can identify components from a serial number and a description over the phone. For anyone in automotive parts looking to increase earnings without leaving the discipline, moving into heavy equipment or industrial distribution is the most direct route. Employment is projected to grow 3.1% through 2034 with roughly 30,200 openings a year. → Full parts advisor career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $38,630 blends every experience level and every setting in this occupation. For pay by level alone, see Pay by Level below.

Published (BLS): BLS OEWS May 2025, SOC 41-2022, United States national estimate. Public, methodologically rigorous, but sampled on a rolling 3-year basis and published ~10 months after collection — so it reflects wages that are already 1–2 years old by the time you read them.

Level and certification medians: distributed across the published BLS percentile range for this SOC code (P10 through P90) according to the credential tiers this occupation actually hires at. They are modeled reference points, not separately surveyed wages.

State and metro figures: modeled — the BLS national median multiplied by the GlobalCybers state wage index, and for metros by the published metro index for that state. They are estimates of local pay, not BLS state or metropolitan-area observations, and are labelled as modeled in the tables below.

No verified placement sample:GlobalCybers does not yet publish a placement median for this role, so no "verified" figure appears anywhere on this page.

Full site methodology & data sources →