Cleaning, Washing, and Metal Pickling Equipment Operators and Tenders 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 ($32,770) to the 90th ($56,590). 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

BLS counted 13,890 Cleaning, Washing, and Metal Pickling Equipment Operators and Tenders jobs in May 2024, which is 0.01% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Oklahoma, where the location quotient is 3.99, meaning the occupation holds 3.99 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 2,530 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 34.1% of the national total.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $56,590, which is 1.7 times the $32,770 at the 10th, a difference of $23,820 annually. Because the mean wage ($43,380) sits above the median ($41,460), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Virginia posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $55,900, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Cleaning, Washing, and Metal Pickling Equipment Operators and Tenders stands number 630 by employment and number 682 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 10% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.2% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 18 of the 40 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $41,460, 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 690 jobs, 5.0% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 66 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, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $44,110 a year, against $44,110 in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, 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 annual wage of $41,460 works out to $3,455 a month before taxes, $1,595 per biweekly paycheck, and $797 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($37,140) to the 75th ($48,280) is worth $11,140 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 $45,606 would sit between the median ($41,460) and the 75th percentile ($48,280), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $37,140, is $4,320 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: Aircraft Structure, Surfaces, Rigging, and Systems Assemblers, Semiconductor Processing Technicians, Plating Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic, Stationary Engineers and Boiler Operators, Power Plant Operators, Crushing, Grinding, and Polishing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders. The full directory is on the Careers hub.