Bakers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($27,560) to the 90th ($48,260). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 231,890 people in May 2024, 0.15% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 32,140 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 27.6% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Maine, whose location quotient of 1.79 says this work is 1.79 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $31,470 at the 25th percentile, $36,650 at the middle, $42,570 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $20,700, 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

Washington posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $42,690, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Bakers stands number 144 by employment and number 768 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Production Occupations, the group median wage is $46,020 across 105 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 20% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.7% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 20 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $36,650, 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

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 17,600 jobs, 7.6% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 365 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $23,130 a year, against $45,840 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, 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

The median Bakers paycheck, gross, is $1,410 every two weeks on an annual $36,650, which is $3,054 a month and $705 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($31,470) to the 75th ($42,570) is worth $11,100 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $40,315 would sit between the median ($36,650) and the 75th percentile ($42,570), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $31,470, is $5,180 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Production Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Painting, Coating, and Decorating Workers, Etchers and Engravers, Shoe and Leather Workers and Repairers, Cutters and Trimmers, Hand, Woodworkers, All Other, Cooling and Freezing Equipment Operators and Tenders. The full directory is on the Careers hub.