MTA Conductor salary

Forty hours a week for fifty-two weeks at $26.70 an hour comes to $55,536. At the sixth-year rate of $38.15 the same multiplication gives $79,352. Those two numbers appear nowhere in Notice 6626 — they are this page's arithmetic on the notice's own hourly rate and its own stated 40-hour work week, and they should be read as such.

The conversion matters because it is the only way to line this title up against the annual figures on the DCAS notices, and against those it looks solid at entry and strong at the top. It also flatters the job slightly, because a straight 52-week multiplication assumes every week is a 40-hour week at the base rate, which the differentials and the shift pattern both complicate.

The safest way to hold the number is as a rate rather than a salary. What MTA has committed to in this document is $26.70 for each of the first hours you work and $38.15 for each of the hours you work in your sixth year. Everything between those two facts is contract, not notice.

There are two endpoints in the sentence and nothing between them. The notice gives a starting rate and a sixth-year rate and does not publish the schedule of steps that connects them — no year-by-year table, no percentage, no statement of how many increments there are.

The gap is large enough to matter. $38.15 is roughly 43% above $26.70 — put the other way round, just under a third of the sixth-year rate is increase rather than starting pay, and a candidate deciding on the first number alone is deciding on the smallest number the notice contains.

Anyone showing you a year-by-year progression for Conductor 6626 is showing you something that is not in the notice. It may be accurate — it may come from a collective bargaining agreement, or from somebody's pay stub — but it did not come from the document that governs this examination, and this site will not reprint it as though it did.

Five things, with an amount for none of them: night and weekend salary differentials, paid holidays, vacation and sick leave, a comprehensive medical plan, and a pension plan.

The first of those is not incidental on this title. The notice's own special-working-conditions line says conductors may be required to work various shifts, including nights, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays — so the differentials attach to hours a large share of the workforce is actually scheduled for, not to occasional cover. A conductor's realised hourly rate and the published base rate are therefore two different things, and the notice publishes only one of them.

This is also the reason to be careful with the annual arithmetic above. The direction of the error is not obvious: a straight base-rate year understates the differentials and overstates any week that is not a full forty hours.

Two candidates appointed off the same eligible list start on the same $26.70, whatever the distance between their marks. The examination score does not buy a higher rate, a shorter route to the sixth-year figure, or a better assignment that the notice describes.

What it buys is a list number, and the list number decides when — or whether — you are reached. That is the whole of the connection between the paper and the pay, and it is worth being precise about because it changes what preparation is for. You are not studying for a raise; you are studying for a position in an order.

The notice adds one structural fact that bears on the same question. A promotion examination for this title is being held for eligible New York City Transit employees, and the names appearing on the promotion list will be considered first in filling vacancies. An open-competitive candidate is competing for a place in the queue that comes after that one.