Crushing, Grinding, and Polishing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Crushing, Grinding, and Polishing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders worker at that point in the distribution, so $58,440 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 28,550 Crushing, Grinding, and Polishing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders jobs in May 2024, which is 0.02% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Iowa, where the location quotient is 6.81, meaning the occupation holds 6.81 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 2,510 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 20.8% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $38,990 at the 25th percentile, $46,890 at the middle, $58,440 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $30,600, a ratio of 1.9 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 47 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Wyoming at $76,350; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Crushing, Grinding, and Polishing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders stands number 489 by employment and number 601 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 2% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.3% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 27 of the 47 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $46,890, 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 740 jobs, 2.6% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

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, $46,740 a year, against $56,520 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $46,890 a year is $3,908 a month gross, $1,803 every two weeks, $902 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($38,990) to the 75th ($58,440) is worth $19,450 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $3,908 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $51,579 would sit between the median ($46,890) and the 75th percentile ($58,440), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $38,990, is $7,900 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

Sibling occupations in Production Occupations: Photographic Process Workers and Processing Machine Operators, Drilling and Boring Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic, Shoe Machine Operators and Tenders, Model Makers, Metal and Plastic, Fabric and Apparel Patternmakers, Sewers, Hand. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.