Agricultural Equipment Operators Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Agricultural Equipment Operators worker at that point in the distribution, so $48,690 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 30,940, or 0.02% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 8,480 jobs; the top three states sum to 40.4% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Iowa posts a location quotient of 5.45, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $36,640 at the 25th percentile, $42,580 at the middle, $48,690 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $26,550, a ratio of 1.8 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Montana posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $53,900, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Agricultural Equipment Operators stands number 476 by employment and number 667 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations, the group median wage is $46,710 across 13 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 9% less than its group median, and it supplies 7.0% of the group's 440,980 jobs. In 21 of the 42 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $42,580, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA is the largest metro employer with 900 jobs, 2.9% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 73 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $37,380 a year, against $42,930 in Salinas, CA. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $42,580 a year is $3,548 a month gross, $1,638 every two weeks, $819 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($36,640) to the 75th ($48,690) is worth $12,050 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $3,548 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $46,838 would sit between the median ($42,580) and the 75th percentile ($48,690), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $36,640, is $5,940 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: First-Line Supervisors of Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Workers, Graders and Sorters, Agricultural Products, Logging Equipment Operators, Agricultural Inspectors, Forest and Conservation Workers, Agricultural Workers, All Other. The full directory is on the Careers hub.