Privacy-friendly analytics help us see which jobs people explore. They stay off unless you agree.Analytics off unless you agree. Details

Read the record
Back to the river
Skip to sources
Time Machine

Taxi drivers

Also called Cab driver, Rideshare driver, Ride-hailing driver, Uber driver, Lyft driver

In brief

In 2025, BLS counted 204,200 US taxi drivers, including the self-employed. Median pay was $42,100 a year in May 2025. The earliest figure here is a Census count of 35,376 from 1910, not measured the same way as today's count. The current technology era for taxi drivers: Driverless robotaxis, since 2020.

Official statistic: latest count, pay.Researched context: earliest figure.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 11.5% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

Official statistic

AI exposure studies

  • 25% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023 Official statistic

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Taxi drivers: jobs and pay since 1910 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-3054

Chicago

Future History. "Taxi drivers: jobs and pay since 1910." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-3054.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_53_3054, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Taxi drivers: jobs and pay since 1910}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-3054}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
View as table
19001925195019752000now
2026
Known then as Hackman (horse-drawn hack and cab driver)
Known then as Taxicab driver (motor cab with a taximeter)
Known then as Taxicab driver (Census: Taxicab drivers and chauffeurs)
Known then as Taxi Drivers and Chauffeurs (SOC 53-3041)
Known then as Taxi Drivers, including ride-hailing drivers (SOC 53-3054)
Known today as Taxi Drivers, including ride-hailing drivers (SOC 53-3054)
Projected to still be called Taxi Drivers, including ride-hailing drivers (SOC 53-3054)
Data from 2025
US Employment
204K

National Employment Matrix total for 2025 from the BLS 2025-35 projections cycle. It counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (86.5% of this occupation in 2025), so it is on a different basis from OEWS wage-and-salary estimates and is not a like-for-like point beside them.

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$42,100

≈ $41,021 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1880

The Census counts hackmen only inside one combined line, "Draymen, hackmen, teamsters, etc.", which mixes passenger cab drivers with freight wagon drivers. That line held 177,586 people in 1880 and 538,933 in 1900. Because most of it was freight hauling, it is not plotted here as a taxi count.

Beat · 1908

Five hundred drivers of the New York Taxicab Company walk out on October 8, 1908, demanding a flat $2.50 a day and free gasoline. The company charged drivers for uniforms and for polishing the brass on top of fuel and upkeep. The strike turned violent, collapsed by mid-November, and its legal costs pushed founder Harry N. Allen out of the business.

Beat · 1937

New York's Haas Act creates the taxi medallion system. Until the mid-1930s the city's taxi industry was unregulated, with no set standard for fares. The act originally capped medallions at 16,900; the number was cut to 11,787 after World War II and stayed there until 1996. When medallions began trading after the war they sold for about $2,500 on average.

Beat · 1949

The FCC's permanent rules for the Taxicab Radio Service take effect on July 1, 1949, after about four years of experimental licensing. The Commission reports roughly 3,000 taxicab radio systems with about 46,000 mobile units.

Beat · 2014

New York has 13,437 yellow-cab medallions and more than 50,000 yellow-taxi drivers. The TLC estimates a driver's average hourly gross revenue at about $26 to $44 depending on the hour, and net revenue after fuel and lease costs at about $14 to $31, with no employer-sponsored benefits.

Beat · 2019

New York's TLC implements minimum per-trip pay rules for drivers dispatched by the major app companies, based on a study of app drivers' actual expenses and aimed at after-expense pay of at least the city's $15 minimum wage. The City Council had also paused new for-hire vehicle licenses to ease congestion, and the pause was renewed in 2019. By 2020 the TLC licensed nearly 185,000 drivers across all its sectors.

Beat · 2025

BLS counts 204,200 taxi-driver jobs in 2025, including ride-hailing drivers, of which 176,600 are self-employed. Only 27,600 are wage-and-salary jobs, which is why the OEWS points on this timeline (wage-and-salary only) are so much lower than the older Census counts.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures, ONS ASHE figures (UK pay and jobs) and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace taxi drivers? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
  • BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
    Target year 2035
    +11.5%
    BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 53-3054 (Taxi drivers): 204.2 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 227.7 thousand in 2035, a change of +23.5 thousand (+11.5%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (86.5% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
    Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
  • Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
    2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
    25%
    of tasks
    What this measures

    Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 53-3054.00 Taxi Drivers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.25, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.125 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.375; GPT-4-rated β 0.281. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

    Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for taxi drivers

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you here Collect fares or vouchers from passengers…

, and make change or issue receipts as necessary.[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you here Communicate with dispatchers by radio, telephone…

, or computer to exchange information and receive requests for passenger service.[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you here Complete accident reports when necessary

Sources[2]

Where your edge is

Tools of the era

How has the work of taxi drivers changed since 1907?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Taximeter-equipped motor taxicab

    The fare meter replaced haggling with a posted price per mile, and the gasoline cab replaced the horse. On October 1, 1907, Harry N. Allen sent sixty-five red French Darracq cabs with fare meters down Fifth Avenue to a hack stand at the Plaza Hotel, charging by the mile; by 1908 his New York Taxicab Company had seven hundred cabs on the street. The driver's job changed from bargaining over a fare to running a metered vehicle owned by a fleet, and the fleet-and-driver tension over who pays for fuel and upkeep started almost at once.

    Effect on the work

    Horse cab work collapsed: the Census line for carriage and hack drivers fell from 35,376 in 1910 to 9,057 in 1920. The new fleet drivers organized early; in October 1908 five hundred of Allen's drivers struck over pay and deductions for gasoline, uniforms and upkeep.

  • Two-way radio dispatch

    Radio let a dispatcher send a cab to a caller instead of the driver cruising or waiting at a stand for a hail. Taxicab radio was licensed experimentally from about 1945, and the Federal Communications Commission's permanent rules for a Taxicab Radio Service took effect on July 1, 1949. By then the FCC counted thousands of taxicab radio systems with tens of thousands of mobile units, and described the service as having grown at a phenomenal rate despite a shortage of frequencies.

  • In-cab card readers and electronic trip records (NYC TPEP)

    New York's Taxi Passenger Enhancement Program put credit card readers in every yellow cab in 2008 and replaced handwritten paper trip sheets with electronic records of pick-up and drop-off times, locations and itemized fares. Before TPEP no New York taxi took cards; by the 2014 Fact Book, a large share of trips were paid by card. For the driver it meant less cash handling and a complete electronic record of every trip.

  • Smartphone ride-hailing apps (Uber, Lyft)

    App platforms moved dispatch, pricing and payment onto the passenger's phone. Uber was founded in 2009 and reported millions of Drivers worldwide on its platform in the last quarter of 2018 (Uber's term covers both ride drivers and delivery couriers). BLS describes the work this way: taxi drivers typically get requests through a central dispatcher, while ride-hailing drivers get requests through a smartphone app, usually drive their own cars, are paid a fare set in the app, and get little training beyond learning the app.

    Effect on the work

    The occupation became mostly self-employed.

  • Driverless robotaxis (Waymo)

    On October 8, 2020, Waymo opened its fully driverless ride service to Waymo One riders in the Phoenix area, saying that in the near term all of its rides there would be fully driverless. The service is confined to specific mapped areas, and no source the curator found measures any effect on national taxi-driver employment.

Part of Transportation · see all 21 roles →
Different role?

See the same long-arc view for your own profession.

Browse the directory by industry, or search by title or SOC code.

Browse all roles

Taxi Drivers employment and pay by year

On record since1880
Latest US employment204,200 (2025)Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$42,100 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+11.5% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error
View all 11 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
Taxi Drivers in the US: employment and pay by year, with sources
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
191035,376n/aDecennial Census 1910[1] Researched contextReport
19209,057n/aDecennial Census 1920[1] Researched contextReport
1950214,000n/aDecennial Census 1950[2] Researched contextReport
1960171,000n/aDecennial Census 1960[2] Researched contextReport
1970158,000n/aDecennial Census 1970[2] Researched contextReport
1980188,593n/aDecennial Census 1980[3] Researched contextReport
202113,950$29,310BLS OEWS May 2021[4] Official statisticReport
202213,820$30,670BLS OEWS May 2022[4] Official statisticReport
202317,770$34,680BLS OEWS May 2023[4] Official statisticReport
202417,510$36,220BLS OEWS May 2024[4] Official statisticReport
2025204,200$42,100BLS Employment Projections 2025 (employment)[5] Official statisticBLS OEWS May 2025 (pay)[6] Official statisticReport
Embed this timeline on your site

Free for any site. Paste this where the timeline should appear; it stays interactive, every datapoint stays cited, and it sets no cookies on your page. How embedding works

<iframe src="https://futurehistory.earth/embed/53-3054"
  width="100%" height="430" style="border:0"
  title="Taxi Drivers, a Future History timeline"
  loading="lazy"></iframe>
<p style="font-size:13px;margin:4px 0 0"><a href="https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-3054">Taxi Drivers: jobs and pay since 1910</a>, from Future History</p>

More in Transportation

See all roles in Transportation