Cooks, Private Household 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 ($38,240) to the 90th ($92,480). 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 900 Cooks, Private Household jobs nationally in May 2024, 0.00% of all U.S. employment in the survey. For this occupation BLS publishes state wage estimates for 1 states but suppresses the state employment counts and location quotients, because the sample behind each state cell is too small to disclose. The state table below is therefore a wage table: it shows what the work pays state by state, and the national ladder above is the employment picture. Any site quoting a state headcount for this occupation is estimating outside the published survey.

One in ten workers in this field earns $38,240 or less, and one in ten earns $92,480 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.4 to 1 and the annual gap is $54,240. The mean ($51,290) versus median ($44,530) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Florida posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $37,910, and Florida the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Cooks, Private Household stands number 821 by employment and number 649 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 29% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.0% of the group's 13,613,500 jobs. In 0 of the 1 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $44,530, 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

Metro estimates for Cooks, Private Household do not exist in the May 2024 OEWS release, so this page does not invent them. Where a salary site shows a city wage for this occupation, it is modeling from other data; the published geography here stops at the state table.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $3,711 a month before tax, $1,713 biweekly, $856 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($42,800) to the 75th ($47,150) is worth $4,350 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 $48,983 would sit between the median ($44,530) and the 75th percentile ($47,150), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $42,800, is $1,730 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: Waiters and Waitresses, Cooks, Restaurant, First-Line Supervisors of Food Preparation and Serving Workers, Food Preparation Workers, Bartenders, Cooks, Fast Food. The full directory is on the Careers hub.