Cooks, All Other 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 Cooks, All Other ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $31,200. 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

With 23,590 jobs nationally, Cooks, All Other make up 0.02% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 5,130 of those jobs, the top three states hold 52.0%, and the deepest concentration sits in Tennessee (location quotient 5.41, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

One in ten workers in this field earns $26,430 or less, and one in ten earns $49,600 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 1.9 to 1 and the annual gap is $23,170. The mean ($38,000) versus median ($36,210) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Texas first at 5,130 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Massachusetts would lead at $67,140. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Cooks, All Other stands number 523 by employment and number 772 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 5% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.2% of the group's 13,613,500 jobs. In 23 of the 37 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $36,210, 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

Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX is the largest metro employer with 1,710 jobs, 7.2% 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, Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro--Franklin, TN posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $30,990 a year, against $46,300 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $3,018 a month before tax, $1,393 biweekly, $696 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($31,200) to the 75th ($42,230) is worth $11,030 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $39,831 would sit between the median ($36,210) and the 75th percentile ($42,230), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $31,200, is $5,010 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Food Preparation Workers, Bartenders, Cooks, Fast Food, Dining Room and Cafeteria Attendants and Bartender Helpers, Dishwashers, Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.