EXPOSED
Roustabouts assemble and dismantle wellhead equipment, dig and backfill ditches, bolt flanges, clean tanks, sling loads and swab out spills — none of which a language model can touch and none of which current field robotics handles in mud, heat, and H2S. The exposure here is not AI writing your work away; it is that the job carries no license, no client relationship, and almost no decision authority, so it is priced as interchangeable labor and shrinks with rig counts, pad automation, and remote monitoring that reduces the number of hands per site. Modal worker is a general laborer on a service crew, not a lead operator.
Nearly all of this fall was the 2020 shock. It has been climbing back since.
Median pay $38,910 → $46,960 -3.4% 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
+2.5% 46,000 → 47,100 on the projections basis
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +2.5% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 50/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
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.
~4,300 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
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Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: trust premium .
Tasks largely resist digitisation Breaking out a stuck flange with a hammer wrench, guiding a load on a tag line, and shoveling out a saltwater spill on an uneven pad are physical sequences no software substitutes for; the 17 rather than 20 reflects that some of your shift — gauging tanks, logging fluid levels, walking the pad to check for leaks — is already being pulled into remote SCADA and pad automation, so the headcount per location falls even while the remaining tasks stay manual.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments You work outdoors on a live wellsite with H2S monitors on your belt, in mud, ice, and 100-degree heat, hauling joints of pipe, digging ditches by hand where a trencher won't fit, and climbing tank batteries — a 19 because virtually nothing happens at a screen, with the point off only for the occasional in-truck paperwork and toolbox talk.
No licence, no signature requirement No state licenses roustabouts; H2S awareness, SafeLand/PEC, and a Class B CDL are employer-imposed access cards you can be replaced with in a week, and the operator's engineer and the company man own the well's regulatory exposure — a 4 rather than 0 only because those safety tickets and the CDL are real barriers to walking on cold.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs Your calls are torque specs, lockout-tagout steps, load charts, and the JSA that was written before you got on site; a 6 rather than 2 because you decide when to stop the job — a gas alarm, a frayed sling, a soft trench wall — and that stop-work authority is yours in the moment even though the well's ambiguous decisions belong to the company man.
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 (17/20 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 (4/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (4/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (6/20) 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 14 of this occupation's 50 points (28%).
Embodiment (19/20) 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.
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 63/100, still EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift as pad automation removes routine hands: the remaining field position becomes the person who calls stop-work, judges whether a joint is safe to break, whether gas readings permit entry, whether a lift is within bounds. If operators formalize stop-work authority with personal sign-off on a JSA — already contractual on many majors' sites — the residual role owns consequential ambiguous calls
Insurer-driven rather than statutory: if E&P operators' well-control and pollution carriers required documented individual certification (SafeLandUSA plus task-specific bolt-torque/rigging credentials) for anyone touching pressure-containing connections, as offshore lifting already requires qualified riggers under API RP 2D
If the crew shrinks to one or two per pad, the surviving work is the non-repeatable tier — leaks, stuck equipment, storm damage, unmapped legacy wellheads, plug-and-abandonment of poorly documented old sites. The P&A backlog (state orphan-well programs, federal IIJA orphan-well funding) is inherently non-standard work that no fixed automation is built for
Federal or state rules that make specific roustabout tasks require a named, individually certified holder — e.g. if BSEE/PHMSA or a state oil and gas commission mandated certified flange-joint integrity technicians (as ASME PCC-1 Appendix A qualification is already contractually required by some majors) or if OSHA finalized a confined-space/H2S entry rule requiring a credentialed attendant and entrant with personal recordkeeping duties, tank cleaning and vessel entry stop being tasks any crew member can be assigned
The limit. Trust premium has no realistic route: the buyer is an E&P operator or service company purchasing labor hours through a contractor, with no end customer who could prefer a human. Any gain here is bounded — liability and judgment credentials attach to lead hands and operators, and a general laborer on a service crew can be promoted into them but the laborer slot itself stays interchangeable. Headcount risk from rig count and pad automation is independent of every dimension above.
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 5,850 | $47,260 +1% |
| Midland, TX | 3,940 | $47,180 +0% |
| Odessa, TX | 2,060 | $45,650 -3% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 1,740 | $48,030 +2% |
| Greeley, CO | 910 | $48,540 +3% |
| Lafayette, LA | 910 | $49,970 +6% |
| Oklahoma City, OK | 800 | $49,930 +6% |
| Pittsburgh, PA | 800 | $47,830 +2% |
| Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA | 40 | $71,280 +52% |
| Columbus, OH | 60 | $66,940 +43% |
| Jackson, MS | 60 | $60,410 +29% |
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 50. 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.