Chemical Plant and System Operators Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Chemical Plant and System Operators offer sit among all 17,840 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

The occupation employed 17,840 people in May 2024, 0.01% of every job BLS counted. Louisiana is the largest employer at 3,360 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 41.9% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Louisiana, whose location quotient of 15.21 says this work is 15.21 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $107,790, which is 2.2 times the $48,000 at the 10th, a difference of $59,790 annually. Because the mean wage ($76,290) sits above the median ($73,540), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

North Dakota posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $112,970, and Louisiana the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Chemical Plant and System Operators stands number 581 by employment and number 263 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 60% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.2% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 10 of the 36 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $73,540, 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

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX is the largest metro employer with 1,820 jobs, 10.2% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

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, $91,110 a year, against $94,760 in Baton Rouge, LA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $73,540 works out to $6,128 a month before taxes, $2,828 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,414 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($57,080) to the 75th ($98,050) is worth $40,970 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 $80,894 would sit between the median ($73,540) and the 75th percentile ($98,050), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $57,080, is $16,460 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: Mixing and Blending Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Paper Goods Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters, Grinding, Lapping, Polishing, and Buffing Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic, Slaughterers and Meat Packers, Extruding and Drawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic. The full directory is on the Careers hub.