A pickup and a gooseneck, moving what somebody needs on location right now. It is the lowest bar of any oilfield driving seat and the easiest one to get into...and the job title gets stuck on postings that are not hotshot at all. Here is how to tell.
| Company | Where | Posted pay | What the description says |
|---|---|---|---|
| Western Skies Hot Shot & Transport | Williston | From $30/hr | Class A · a year on a 40 ft gooseneck · full or part time |
| Pathfinder Inspections & Field Services | Dickinson | Not posted | Tubing, rods and oilfield supplies · Class A · no wage in the ad |
| TTK Enterprises | Watford City | Not posted | Class A with endorsements such as hazmat and tanker · no wage in the ad |
Three were confirmed still up on September 27, and those are the ones named here. Only one printed a wage. A fourth, read in August, paid $28–30/hr for pickup and gooseneck work and still counts, unnamed. In August four more postings titled hotshot printed a wage and turned out to be other jobs. See the section below.
That is the band we see for a straight hotshot seat in the Bakken. It is our judgment from working this basin, not a wage we can point you at.
This is the most useful thing on this page, so it goes first. In August, of the five North Dakota postings titled hotshot that printed a wage, we read them and found:
So if you are searching hotshot because you want a pickup and gooseneck job, read the duties before you get excited about a number.
Somebody on a location needs a part, a fitting, a pump or a piece of equipment, and they need it today. You go get it and you take it there.
It is the least physical of the oilfield driving seats and the most reactive. You are not running a set route, you are answering what broke.
Hotshot pays less than winch, less than hydrovac and a lot less than crude. What it has is the lowest bar and the best exit.
One posting we read in August offered cross training onto winch and slick deck right in the ad, and it was home every night with 100 percent paid medical and dental. That is the pattern worth chasing...get in on the pickup, learn the roads and the pads, then get moved onto heavier equipment on the company's time instead of paying for it yourself.
Ask about cross training in the interview. It is the whole reason to take a hotshot seat over a better paying one somewhere else.
Watch the pay structure too. Some hotshot work is paid a percentage of the load rather than hourly, and a percentage is not comparable to an hourly rate. Ask what an average week actually paid the last person in the seat.
Hotshot is one of the easier oilfield driving seats to start in, and the ladder out of it is real. If you are not carded at all yet, swamping is the other way in.
How Swampers Get Into A Truck →In August we found five North Dakota postings titled hotshot that printed a wage, opened all five, and found that only one of them described hotshot work. On September 27 we read the North Dakota hotshot postings we found for oilfield work, and the table names three of them, with the company and town next to each. One of them printed a wage. The August one was not confirmed still up, so it still counts for 6 months from the last day we saw it, but it loses its name.
The $25–30 band is our own read, boxed and labelled. Where a role is too thin to source properly, we tell you what we think it pays from working this basin rather than leaving you with nothing. If a figure is not in that amber box, an employer printed it.
We report what a company posted. We do not grade it. Naming what those other four postings actually described is not a criticism of them...they are real jobs, some of them better paying than hotshot. It is just that the title will not tell you which one you are applying for.
No estimated or modeled salaries appear here.
The postings behind this page were read in August 2026, and the newer ones in September 2026. The figures here are a reading from those months, not a promise of what any company pays today.
We read the descriptions and tell you what the job actually is, not what the title says. Free, every week.
Every one of these is a real seat in this basin, paying what the company said it pays. Never worked the patch before? Start with how to get an oilfield job with no experience.
Work one of these seats? Tell us what you actually make. Your name, email and company are never published, and nothing goes public until a seat has 5 reports behind it.