The most common tanker seat in this basin, and the hardest one to compare two offers on. Seven postings wrote the pay four different ways, and a weekly number tells you nothing until you know whether you sleep at home.
| Company | Where | Posted pay | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| WISCO Trucking (WTI) | Williston | $2,500/wk avg | Home daily · $2,000 sign on · also offers 26%, based on experience |
| Stay Loaded Trucking | Tioga | $2,500–3,500/wk | 1099 · pay is 30% · nights · manual |
| Massive Services | Watford City | $29–32/hr | Tanker or side dump · 12 hour days or nights |
| Jericho Services | Watford City | $27–30/hr | 5 on, 1 off · free company housing · about 70+ hours a week |
Four were confirmed still up on September 27, and those are the ones named here. Two more, read earlier in September, still count toward the ranges, unnamed: $3,000–4,000 a week on a hitch, and $400–600 a day on call.
The word hauling does a lot of hiding here. Pulled from the duties across these postings, this is the day:
You are outside, on hoses, at every stop. The driving is the part between the work.
Straight off the postings, the company seats only:
Weekly. By the day. By the hour. A percentage. Same job, same basin, and the companies write the pay four different ways.
That is not us failing to average it. It is the actual state of the trade, and it is the single biggest reason hands get burned comparing two water hauling offers. A weekly figure and a day rate are not comparable until somebody tells you how many days are in the week and how long they run, and none of the weekly or daily postings did.
So we print what they printed. A weekly number stays weekly. A day rate stays a day rate. Anybody who hands you one blended hourly figure for this role made up the hours to get there.
Two postings we read in September, and on paper one paid a lot better. It posted $3,000 to $4,000 a week, on a rotation of 4 to 6 weeks on with 7 to 10 days off.
The other one posts a $2,500 weekly average and you are home every night.
Run that out. A hitch seat like that is more money per week, and it also keeps you 4 to 6 weeks away from your house before you get 7 to 10 days back. The local seat is less on paper and you sleep in your own bed 365 nights a year.
Neither one is the better job. They are different lives, and the ad only shows you the number. If you have kids in Williston that gap is the whole decision, and it is invisible if you sort offers by pay.
One posting we read in September said $8,000 to $10,000 a week. It sat well above every other number here because it is a different kind of number. That is revenue, not a wage.
From that same posting: you had to have your own tanker trailer, though they would lease you one. A fuel card was provided if you needed it and the cost of that fuel came directly out of your settlement check. Owner operators were responsible for their own health and dental.
So that figure is gross revenue with the trailer, the fuel and the insurance still to come out of it. It belongs on this page because a real company posted it. It does not belong next to a company driver number, which is why it never went into a range here.
The gate was real too, and it was the tightest on this page. Two years of Bakken production water hauling, written in as required. Two years verifiable tanker. Two years verifiable Class A. Plus the trailer.
The same Williston outfit that posts a $2,500 weekly average also lists percentage positions at 26 percent, based on experience. A Tioga outfit says flat out that pay is 30 percent, on a 1099 seat, and prints $2,500–3,500 a week beside it. Percentage is a genuinely different way to get paid, and a 1099 seat pays you before any taxes come out.
Percentage pay in this basin is usually a cut of the load or of the ticket, and the difference between those two matters enormously on a slow week. An ad has limited room and most of them list the structure without the arithmetic.
We are not going to fill in arithmetic nobody printed. What we will give you is the question to walk in with: percentage of what, calculated how, and paid on which line of the ticket. Any dispatcher can answer that in a sentence.
Every company seat on this page needs a Class A, and most want tanker. If you do not have a Class A, the door into this trade is a seat that does not require it...swamper riding with an operator, or a yard and roustabout seat...and you build the time while the company puts you through your licence.
See Swamper — No CDL →Seven North Dakota water hauling postings, every one of them opened and read all the way through in September 2026, every one live at the time we read it. On September 27 we checked the earlier ones again and read the new ones: four were confirmed still up, and those are named with company and town next to each number so you can go check us. A posting we could not find still up counts toward the ranges for 6 months from the last day we saw it, but it loses its name.
That date matters. What is printed here is what each company was posting in September 2026, not a promise of what they pay today. Rates move, and a posting can come down the week after we read it. If you are looking at this months from now, treat every figure as a September 2026 reading and confirm it with the company.
We report what a company posted. We do not grade it. Where a posting qualifies its own figure...calling it an average, attaching it to a rotation, or calling it 1099...that qualifier is printed with it, because that is the part that changes what the number means.
No estimated or modeled salaries appear here. Job sites generate their own guesses for this role and those are not real numbers. One example of why: a job board displayed a salary range with cents in it on a Bakken listing, while the employer's own posting text said pay was negotiable depending on experience. The board built that range itself. The company had not published one.
Government baseline for context: BLS puts heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers at a national median of $57,440/yr and mean of $58,240/yr (May 2024, OEWS). That is every truck driver in the country in every trailer type, which is why a Bakken tanker number looks nothing like it.
We post a fresh North Dakota board every week, and we read the descriptions so you do not have to. Free.
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.