Chefs and Head Cooks 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 ($36,000) to the 90th ($96,030). 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

With 182,320 jobs nationally, Chefs and Head Cooks make up 0.12% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 26,500 of those jobs, the top three states hold 33.0%, and the deepest concentration sits in Nevada (location quotient 2.52, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $96,030, which is 2.7 times the $36,000 at the 10th, a difference of $60,030 annually. Because the mean wage ($64,720) sits above the median ($60,990), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

The state spread for Chefs and Head Cooks runs from the $81,200 median in Hawaii down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in California (26,500 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Chefs and Head Cooks stands number 172 by employment and number 393 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Food Preparation and Serving Related Occupations, the group median wage is $34,460 across 17 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 77% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.3% of the group's 13,613,500 jobs. In 19 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $60,990, 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 15,560 jobs, 8.5% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, New Orleans-Metairie, LA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $47,390 a year, against $81,590 in Providence-Warwick, RI-MA. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $60,990 works out to $5,082 a month before taxes, $2,346 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,173 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($47,710) to the 75th ($76,790) is worth $29,080 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 $67,089 would sit between the median ($60,990) and the 75th percentile ($76,790), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $47,710, is $13,280 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Food Preparation and Serving Related Occupations

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Waiters and Waitresses, Cooks, Restaurant, First-Line Supervisors of Food Preparation and Serving Workers, Food Preparation Workers, Bartenders, Cooks, Fast Food. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.