EXPOSED
Pumping fuel, checking oil and tire pressure, washing windshields, and hooking up boats at a marina dock are physical tasks in wet, cluttered, weather-exposed settings — language models cannot touch them and fueling robotics remain a novelty. The real threat is not AI but self-service, kiosk payment, and automated car washes, which already erased most of this occupation outside New Jersey, Oregon, and full-service marinas. What remains automatable now is the register work: transactions, receipts, loyalty signups, inventory logs, and shift paperwork.
Part 2020 shock, part continued decline in the years since.
Median pay $25,200 → $35,670 +13.2% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
-1% 100,000 → 99,000 on the projections basis
Exposed, and shrinking
Both signals point the same way: the tasks are largely automatable and the BLS projects -1% by 2034. This is the case where the score and the forecast agree, and it is the one worth taking seriously.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~14,400 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
BusterFillerFuelerPitmanTenderGreaserPumpmanTankmanHandymanLube ManNightmanServicerAttendantDock HandDrive ManFront ManGaragemanFuel ClerkGas JockeyGas PumperGrease ManLubricatorRim BusterBoat Fueler
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Sitting at 13 rather than higher because the physical half — dragging a fuel hose to a boat gunwale, topping off washer fluid, mounting a wiper blade — has no software substitute, but the other half of your shift (ringing up sales, running card readers, logging tank dips, filling out shift reconciliation) is already handled by kiosks and POS systems in most states.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments A 16 reflects a dock or forecourt that is never the same twice: fueling on a rocking boat, kneeling on wet pavement to read a tire gauge in February, hoisting an outboard, moving vehicles through a wash bay — uncontrolled surfaces and moving hulls are precisely where robotics still fails, though the fixed pump island keeps it below the 18-20 of field repair work.
No licence, no signature requirement At 2 there is no licence gating this job — no state credential to pump gas or launch a watercraft — and where a hazmat or fuel-handling certificate exists, it belongs to the station operator or marina under EPA/OSHA rules, not to you personally, so nothing in law says a human must hold the nozzle except New Jersey's and Oregon's attendant statutes, which are policy, not licensure.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs A 4 is right because the decisions are bounded and procedural — which grade the customer asked for, whether to stop fueling on a spill, when to call the manager about a bad card — with spill response, static rules, and grounding steps written in the site's operating manual rather than left to your call.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (13/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (2/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (6/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (4/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 12 of this occupation's 41 points (29%).
Embodiment (16/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
Bicycle Repairers EXPOSED
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 55/100, still EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift as register work, loyalty signup and shift paperwork migrate to kiosks and app payment, leaving the surviving jobs concentrated in genuinely two-tier settings: marina dockhands doing boat handling in wind and current, EV charge-bay assistance and cable troubleshooting, hazmat fuel-delivery oversight. This raises the score only for the remaining roles while the headcount shrinks — it is not protection for the occupation's size.
State fire-marshal / weights-and-measures rules mandating a trained attendant to dispense fuel — New Jersey's full-service ban on self-serve (N.J.S.A. 34:3A-4) is the live example; Oregon's 2023 HB 2426 went the other way and repealed most of its ban. A comparable statute or an NFPA 30A adoption requiring an attendant present for marine/dockside fueling (fuel-spill and vapor liability on water) would raise this materially; marina fueling already carries Coast Guard and state spill-response obligations naming a responsible attendant.
Full-service marina and premium-detail segments where customers pay explicitly for a human handling a six-figure boat — a documented willingness to pay dock-attendant service fees rather than self-dock, plus dealer/luxury-brand valet fueling programs. Narrow and segment-limited, not general.
If insurers writing marina operator policies require a named attendant to conduct and sign a pre-fueling safety check (bilge ventilation, engine off, no ignition sources) as a condition of coverage — an existing practice in some marine liability underwriting — the attendant owns a consequential call under ambiguity.
The limit. The binding constraint is not AI capability but self-service economics: kiosks and automated washes already removed most of these jobs, and Oregon's 2023 repeal shows the attendant-mandate lever moving in the deregulating direction. Even with every lever firing, the ceiling is roughly mid-50s and applies to a shrinking marina/full-service remnant rather than the occupation as counted.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 9,370 | $36,440 +2% |
| Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA | 2,870 | $36,420 +2% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 2,830 | $39,070 +10% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 2,770 | $31,040 -13% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 2,490 | $34,880 -2% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 1,890 | $34,800 -2% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 1,660 | $35,690 +0% |
| Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO | 1,510 | $38,600 +8% |
| Urban Honolulu, HI | 170 | $50,360 +41% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 1,100 | $45,760 +28% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 460 | $45,020 +26% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 41. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.