Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders 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 ($34,890) to the 90th ($60,430). 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 47,540 Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders jobs in May 2024, which is 0.03% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in South Dakota, where the location quotient is 3.15, meaning the occupation holds 3.15 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 3,830 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 22.5% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $38,540 at the 25th percentile, $45,700 at the middle, $52,000 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $25,540, a ratio of 1.7 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 Minnesota at $56,430; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders stands number 398 by employment and number 629 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 1% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.5% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 23 of the 47 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $45,700, 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 1,710 jobs, 3.6% 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, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $40,650 a year, against $55,500 in Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI. 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: $3,808 a month before tax, $1,758 biweekly, $879 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($38,540) to the 75th ($52,000) is worth $13,460 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 $50,270 would sit between the median ($45,700) and the 75th percentile ($52,000), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $38,540, is $7,160 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.