Cooks, Fast Food Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Cooks, Fast Food offer sit among all 668,230 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

With 668,230 jobs nationally, Cooks, Fast Food make up 0.43% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 136,550 of those jobs, the top three states hold 41.6%, and the deepest concentration sits in West Virginia (location quotient 5.13, 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 $38,980, which is 1.7 times the $22,370 at the 10th, a difference of $16,610 annually. Because the mean wage ($31,140) sits above the median ($30,160), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Hawaii posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $40,300, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Cooks, Fast Food stands number 55 by employment and number 826 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 12% less than its group median, and it supplies 4.9% of the group's 13,613,500 jobs. In 22 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $30,160, 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 55,760 jobs, 8.3% 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $21,540 a year, against $42,750 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

The median Cooks, Fast Food paycheck, gross, is $1,160 every two weeks on an annual $30,160, which is $2,513 a month and $580 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($26,540) to the 75th ($35,710) is worth $9,170 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $33,176 would sit between the median ($30,160) and the 75th percentile ($35,710), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $26,540, is $3,620 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Cooks, Restaurant, First-Line Supervisors of Food Preparation and Serving Workers, Food Preparation Workers, Bartenders, Dining Room and Cafeteria Attendants and Bartender Helpers, Dishwashers. The full directory is on the Careers hub.