Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria offer sit among all 448,260 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

May 2024 employment stood at 448,260, or 0.29% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 35,110 jobs; the top three states sum to 19.3% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Oklahoma posts a location quotient of 2.37, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $48,320, which is 1.8 times the $26,800 at the 10th, a difference of $21,520 annually. Because the mean wage ($37,310) sits above the median ($36,450), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Texas first at 35,110 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Washington would lead at $48,260. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria stands number 79 by employment and number 769 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 6% more than its group median, and it supplies 3.3% of the group's 13,613,500 jobs. In 25 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $36,450, 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 15,130 jobs, 3.4% 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, Montgomery, AL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $25,210 a year, against $52,380 in Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA. 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: $3,038 a month before tax, $1,402 biweekly, $701 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($30,530) to the 75th ($42,860) is worth $12,330 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 $40,095 would sit between the median ($36,450) and the 75th percentile ($42,860), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $30,530, is $5,920 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: Waiters and Waitresses, Cooks, Restaurant, First-Line Supervisors of Food Preparation and Serving Workers, Food Preparation Workers, Bartenders, Cooks, Fast Food. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.