Shipping and Receiving Clerk Salary 2026,
What Shipping and Receiving Clerks Actually Earn

How much do shipping and receiving clerks make in 2026?

Shipping and receiving clerks have their own BLS wage series: OEWS May 2025 gives the SOC 43-5071 national median as $45,260 a year ($21.76 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $34,650 and the top 10% at $62,190. The role is the documentation layer of goods movement: verifying inbound shipments against purchase orders and packing lists, recording receipts in an ERP or warehouse system, resolving discrepancies and damage claims, preparing outbound paperwork including bills of lading and customs documents, arranging carrier pickups and maintaining inventory records. It is also one of the more clearly declining clerical occupations, with BLS projecting employment 7.7% lower by 2034 — the direct result of barcode and RFID scanning, automated receiving, electronic data interchange and system integration removing manual data entry and verification steps. That does not make the work disappear so much as consolidate: the clerks who remain are the ones handling exceptions, international documentation, ERP transactions and inventory accuracy rather than typing what a scanner could read. The realistic strategy in this role is to build system and analytical skills toward inventory control, logistics coordination or purchasing. Employment is projected to change by -7.7% through 2034 with roughly 69,300 openings a year. → Full shipping and receiving clerk career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $45,260 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 43-5071, 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 →