Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters offer sit among all 79,540 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 79,540, or 0.05% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 8,560 jobs; the top three states sum to 24.2% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Indiana posts a location quotient of 3.07, 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: $38,240 at the 25th percentile, $46,020 at the middle, $54,010 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $28,520, 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

The state spread for Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters runs from the $57,550 median in New York down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in California (8,560 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters stands number 306 by employment and number 623 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 0% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.9% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 28 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $46,020, 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

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 3,160 jobs, 4.0% 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, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $40,640 a year, against $61,010 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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 $46,020 works out to $3,835 a month before taxes, $1,770 per biweekly paycheck, and $885 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($38,240) to the 75th ($54,010) is worth $15,770 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 $50,622 would sit between the median ($46,020) and the 75th percentile ($54,010), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $38,240, is $7,780 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

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Grinding and Polishing Workers, Hand, Medical Appliance Technicians, Power Distributors and Dispatchers, Textile Cutting Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Forging Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic, Painting, Coating, and Decorating Workers. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.