How To Become An Unloader: What It Is and Career Path

What is an unloader and how to become one

Updated January 8, 2025

4 min read

If you love organizing items or putting away merchandise, a career as an unloader might be an excellent option to consider. An Unloader is a position that comes with decent starting pay rates and access to many valuable benefits. It's an ideal position for many job seekers. As an unloader, your core duty is to ensure the distribution of merchandise throughout the store in a timely fashion. Facilitating the distribution of goods in the store, typically, you may unload materials within a plant, yard, or warehouse.

Working in a warehouse setting, you may take charge of unloading merchandise that arrives at the warehouse. You may perform other tasks, such as checking work orders and incoming shipments, moving or lifting merchandise from delivery trucks, picking orders from storage areas, and ensuring all the items are unloaded safely. Aside from offloading and unpacking, your job description also entails properly arranging or storing unloaded items in the store.

There are no minimum education requirements to become a warehouse unloader. Previous experience in a similar role is preferred, but it's purely optional. To be successful as an unloader, you must have effective communication and management skills, physical strength, and endurance to lift heavy products.

Typically, you may work full-time. However, you may work part-time, overnight, or early morning hours during peak business periods. Generally, you may earn an average annual wage of $50,000 along with additional benefits of health insurance and paid time off.

ScoreUnloaderUS Average

Salary

2.6

Avg. Salary $32,885

Avg. Salary $59,228

Stability level

6.4

Growth rate 6%

Growth rate 0.3%

Diversity

9.5

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 1.13%

Asian 5.27%

Black or African American 14.09%

Hispanic or Latino 18.84%

Unknown 5.27%

White 55.40%

Gender

female 12.67%

male 87.33%

Age - 39

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 3.00%

Asian 7.00%

Black or African American 14.00%

Hispanic or Latino 19.00%

White 57.00%

Gender

female 47.00%

male 53.00%

Age - 39

Stress level

6.4

Stress level is manageable

7.1 - high

Complexity level

4.7

Complexity level is intermediate

7 - challenging

Work life balance

4.4

Work life balance is poor

6.4 - fair

Key steps to become an unloader

Explore unloader education requirements

Most common unloader degrees

High School Diploma

59.4 %

Diploma

14.5 %

Associate

12.2 %

Start to develop specific unloader skills

Skills	Percentages
Pallets	24.23%
Work Ethic	17.53%
Customer Service	10.09%
Electric Pallet Jack	9.26%
Tractor Trailer	6.42%

Complete relevant unloader training and internships

Accountants spend an average of Less than 1 month on post-employment, on-the-job training. New unloaders learn the skills and techniques required for their job and employer during this time. The chart below shows how long it takes to gain competency as an unloader based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data and data from real unloader resumes.

Research unloader duties and responsibilities

Prepare pallets by following prescribe stacking arrangement and properly tagging pallets.
Volunteer work for kohl's cares events.

Prepare your unloader resume

When your background is strong enough, you can start writing your unloader resume.

You can use Zippia's AI resume builder to make the resume writing process easier while also making sure that you include key information that hiring managers expect to see on an unloader resume. You'll find resume tips and examples of skills, responsibilities, and summaries, all provided by Zippi, your career sidekick.

Choose from 10+ customizable unloader resume templates

Build a professional unloader resume in minutes. Browse through our resume examples to identify the best way to word your resume. Then choose from 10+ resume templates to create your unloader resume.

Apply for unloader jobs

Now it's time to start searching for an unloader job. Consider the tips below for a successful job search:

Browse job boards for relevant postings
Consult your professional network
Reach out to companies you're interested in working for directly
Watch out for job scams

How do unloaders rate their job?

-/5

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Unloader reviews

A zippia user wrote a review on Jul 2020

Pros

Stay busy stay in shape early hours no one ever died from a little hard work good lumpers can throw 1000 pcs an hour off the floor of a trailer on to a pallet or skid.all you hear is slaming off the wall of the trailer your unloading.

Cons

I like it all whats not to like I like it so much that I owned and operated qualified material handlers inc denver colorado for 10 yrs

A zippia user wrote a review on Sep 2019