If you run student transportation, you already know: the driver shortage isn't new, isn't going away, and isn't quite as bad as it was two years ago. The picture in 2025 is a mix of slow recovery and stubborn structural gaps that no single district has been able to fully close.
Here's what the most recent numbers say — and what the districts seeing the least disruption are doing differently.
The headline numbers
Compared with August 2019 (pre-pandemic baseline), there were 21,200 fewer school bus drivers employed in August 2025 — a 9.5% decline. There has been a small recovery year-over-year: the workforce grew by 2,300 drivers, or 1.1%, between August 2024 and August 2025. That's the largest one-year gain since the pandemic began, but it's a long way from closing the gap.
In a fall 2025 survey, 81% of school administrators reported they still face a driver shortage. The same survey found that 26% of districts have had to cut or shorten bus routes — meaning fewer pickups, longer rides, or in the worst cases, routes that no longer run at all.
A separate 2024 industry survey found that 91% of school and district transportation leaders were experiencing a driver shortage in their district. The number has come down slightly since then, but the headline is consistent: roughly four out of five districts are still hiring below where they need to be.
Wages are finally moving
For most of the last decade, school bus driver wages have lagged inflation. In 2025, that finally broke.
Median hourly wage in August 2025: $22.45
One-year wage growth: +4.2% — the largest jump since the start of the pandemic
That's a meaningful raise, but it's relative to a low baseline. A driver clocking 30 paid hours per week (mornings, afternoons, and a handful of activities) brings home roughly $35,000 a year — before any health benefits, and often without a guaranteed full schedule during summer. Commercial truck drivers with the same Class B CDL can earn 50–80% more.
The wage gap is the single most-cited reason drivers leave for other CDL work, and it's why retention has lagged hiring across the country.
The states that are hurting most
Three states are dealing with especially severe shortages in 2025: Maine, Missouri, and Vermont. Each of these shares a common thread — large rural geography, sparse stop density, and pay scales that haven't kept pace with neighboring states.
Rural districts already pay 40% more per student on transportation than urban districts (more on that in The hidden price tag on a school bus seat). Compound that with a thin labor pool and you get a structural problem no single year's hiring push can solve.
What's correlated with the disruption
The single strongest connection in the research is between transportation reliability and student attendance. The Education Commission of the States and a 2023 EAB survey both found:
44% of school leaders identify transportation challenges as contributing to chronic absenteeism.
21% of school leaders say transportation is the most significant contributor.
Driver shortages were the top transportation issue named by 92% of schools surveyed in 2023.
When buses are late, kids miss first period. When kids miss first period repeatedly, attendance counts drop. When attendance counts drop, state funding follows in many states, which puts further pressure on the transportation budget. The loop closes ugly.
What the districts holding steady are doing
We've spent time inside three districts in 2025 that have lost fewer drivers than peers their size. There's no single silver bullet, but a few patterns repeat:
They pay for the route, not the run. Drivers are paid for the planned route hours even if a route comes in 15 minutes short on a given day. This sounds expensive — in practice, it has stabilized retention enough that overtime spend (paying remaining drivers to cover open routes) drops more than the guarantee costs.
They eliminate the "split shift trap." A driver doing a morning + afternoon route has hours of dead time mid-day. The districts that hold drivers offer paid mid-day work — activity runs, vehicle inspections, training, dispatch shadowing. It turns a 4-hour-paid day into a 6.5-hour-paid day.
They publish "where's the bus" tools so drivers field fewer questions. This is the boring one. Drivers consistently rate "parent calls and complaints" as one of the top three day-to-day frustrations. The districts where parents can see the bus on a map have meaningfully fewer driver-facing complaints to absorb. That's literally what we built NextStop to do.
They start sub recruitment earlier. Substitute drivers (CDL-licensed, no full route, available on call) are the buffer that keeps the regular schedule on the road. The districts holding steady recruit subs as if they were full-time hires — same hiring fairs, same training cohorts, same employee-of-the-month attention.
They reduce route count where they can. Consolidating two thin routes into one fuller route saves a driver position. It also adds 10–25 minutes to some kids' rides, which is the trade-off you should be visible about with families.
What's not working
A few things districts have tried that the data doesn't support:
One-time signing bonuses without retention bonuses. Districts that paid a $2,000 sign-on saw the hire rate spike for two months, then plateau. Many of those new hires left within the first six months for other CDL work. Bonuses tied to staying — paid out at 6, 12, and 24 months — have a better hold rate.
CDL training reimbursement after the fact. Telling a candidate "we'll reimburse the cost if you pass" puts the upfront expense on the candidate. The districts that pay tuition to the school up front, with a one-year work commitment, fill seats faster.
Job fairs without ride-alongs. Many people who could do the job don't apply because they've never been on a school bus driver's side of the wheel. The districts running 90-minute ride-along sessions for prospective candidates report a noticeably higher conversion from "interested" to "hired."
The long view
The shortage is structural, not cyclical. Aging-out of the existing driver workforce (median age in the high 50s) plus a labor market with better-paid alternatives for CDL holders means even at the current improvement rate, getting back to the 2019 baseline will take years.
The districts who are most resilient have stopped treating this as a hiring problem to solve in a single season and started treating it as a workforce-design problem to manage every year — with the route plan, the pay structure, the substitute pipeline, and the parent-facing tools all in the same conversation.
If you'd like a copy of the district-side checklist we use during transportation reviews, reach out and we'll send it over.
Sources: HopSkipDrive 2024–2025 Driver Shortage Impact Report, Economic Policy Institute analysis, Stateline reporting, Education Commission of the States.