Butchers and Meat Cutters Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Butchers and Meat Cutters ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $34,460. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 140,040 Butchers and Meat Cutters jobs in May 2024, which is 0.09% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Iowa, where the location quotient is 2.91, meaning the occupation holds 2.91 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 21,220 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 30.7% of the national total.

One in ten workers in this field earns $28,850 or less, and one in ten earns $57,130 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.0 to 1 and the annual gap is $28,280. The mean ($41,300) versus median ($38,960) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Hawaii posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $50,220, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Butchers and Meat Cutters stands number 216 by employment and number 719 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 15% less than its group median, and it supplies 1.6% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 26 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $38,960, 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

Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN is the largest metro employer with 7,190 jobs, 5.1% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

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, $24,180 a year, against $53,440 in Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $38,960 works out to $3,247 a month before taxes, $1,498 per biweekly paycheck, and $749 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($34,460) to the 75th ($47,200) is worth $12,740 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $42,856 would sit between the median ($38,960) and the 75th percentile ($47,200), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $34,460, is $4,500 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: Layout Workers, Metal and Plastic, Photographic Process Workers and Processing Machine Operators, Drilling and Boring Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic, Shoe Machine Operators and Tenders, Model Makers, Metal and Plastic, Fabric and Apparel Patternmakers. The full directory is on the Careers hub.