18th Annual Salary Survey: Experience and staying power define 2025 salary trends

Modern Materials Handling has released its 18th Annual Salary Survey, and the headline verdict is blunt: experience and staying power define 2025 salary trends in materials handling. Now in its eighteenth year, the survey is one of the few consistent yardsticks for pay in this corner of the labor market. Its framing this year marks a shift worth noting for anyone in the field.

The finding lands at a moment when workers across logistics and supply-chain roles are recalibrating. Eighteen consecutive years of data give the survey a rare longitudinal view. A single-year snapshot can mislead. A series this long shows direction. And the direction for 2025, according to the survey's title and framing, rewards tenure.

What does this change for materials handling professionals?

The practical question is straightforward: what does this change for the individual worker in warehousing, distribution, or materials management? The survey's emphasis suggests that employers are placing a premium on accumulated experience and retention rather than on aggressive external hiring at premium rates.

That has consequences for how workers should read their own market position. If staying power drives pay, the leverage sits with people who have built depth in a role, an operation, or an equipment category. The churn-and-jump strategy that defined much of the post-pandemic hiring market appears, on this survey's reading, to be losing currency in this sector.

For employers, the same signal cuts the other way. A pay structure built around experience implies a retention problem solved at the source. Replacing a tenured operator or supervisor costs more than keeping one. The survey's framing hints that more operations have run that math.

National trend, sector detail

Materials handling sits inside the broader logistics labor market, which has swung between shortage and softness over the past several years. Modern Materials Handling has tracked pay through all of it. The 18th edition lands in 2025 with a consistent message rather than a shock: the market is pricing patience.

Sector-level detail in the survey traditionally breaks out pay by job function, facility size, and geography, as befits a questionnaire distributed to the publication's professional readership. Readers comparing their own compensation against the findings should keep the sample in mind — it reflects survey respondents in the industry, not a census of all US logistics workers.

How to read one survey responsibly

One survey is one instrument. It carries weight here because of its age: eighteen annual readings smooth out noise and let trends surface. But salary surveys describe the recent past. Anyone negotiating in 2025 should pair this data with current local postings and internal pay bands before drawing conclusions about their own worth.

The throughline, though, is clear and consistent with the title: in 2025, the materials handling labor market is paying for experience and rewarding the people who stay. Expect that emphasis — retention-driven pay, tenure-weighted raises — to shape both hiring plans and wage growth in the sector through the year ahead.