Districts Spent $30 Billion Moving Kids to School. The Driver Corps Never Came Back.

Getting a child to a classroom is not free, and school districts have been paying more for it every year.▸ Nationally, public schools spent $30.2 billion on student transportation in the 2021-22 fiscal year, per the National Center for Education Statistics — up 8% in nominal dollars from the last full pre-pandemic school year. What that money has not bought back is the workforce that makes the buses run: school bus driver employment is still 9.5% below where it stood in August 2019, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of Current Population Survey data. Districts didn't close that gap with money. They closed it by cutting service.

Student transportation is one of seven subfunctions inside "support services" — the roughly $282 billion school districts spend nationally on everything that isn't a teacher in front of a class.▸ At $30.2 billion, it's the smallest of the major subfunctions, behind operations and maintenance, student support services, and school and general administration.

Being the smallest line item hasn't spared it from growth.▸ In nominal dollars, national transportation spending rose from $27.9 billion in the 2018-19 school year to $30.2 billion in FY2022 — districts adding routes, replacing aging buses, and, increasingly, raising driver pay.

Raising the budget line is the easy part.▸ Filling the driver's seat is not. School bus driving is a split-shift job — a burst of hours at the start of the school day, a gap in the middle, another burst at the end — built for almost no one's household budget. It is also, per EPI's analysis, a low-wage occupation that leaves the people who do it in poverty at higher rates than other employed workers. Districts spent the 2010s underfunding the job; they're now spending the 2020s trying to buy their way out of the shortage that decade created.

The pandemic knocked 42,417 drivers out of the job between August 2019 and its trough in August 2020.▸ Five years later, the corps has recovered only about half of that loss — 202,076 drivers as of August 2025, still 21,176 short of 2019. The improvement that has come is wage-driven: the median hourly wage for school bus drivers reached $22.45 in August 2025, up 4.2% in real terms from a year earlier, after a decade of mostly flat pay through the 2010s. Districts are finally paying more. They still aren't paying enough to fully staff the routes they had before 2020.

The $30.2 billion and the missing 21,176 drivers meet at the same point: the route sheet.▸ In the 2025 State of School Transportation Report, a survey of more than 500 school district leaders conducted with the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 81% of district administrators said driver shortages were a problem in their school or district, and 73% reported transportation budget shortfalls affecting operations. Rather than pay their way to a full roster, 26% of districts said they had responded by cutting or shortening bus routes — meaning record spending on transportation and a persistent driver shortfall have produced the same outcome for a quarter of the country's districts: less bus service than before.

Spending figures compare nominal (not inflation-adjusted) dollars across two NCES survey years and should be read as gross growth, not real growth. Employment figures cover state/local government and private-sector school bus drivers working in elementary and secondary schools specifically, per EPI's CPS methodology, and exclude the self-employed and drivers employed in other industries. The 81%/73%/26% figures are self-reported by district administrators in a survey of 500+ districts, not a census of all U.S. school systems.