Dishwashers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Dishwashers worker at that point in the distribution, so $36,750 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

With 471,670 jobs nationally, Dishwashers make up 0.31% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 73,050 of those jobs, the top three states hold 31.3%, and the deepest concentration sits in Hawaii (location quotient 2.38, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $28,740 at the 25th percentile, $33,670 at the middle, $36,750 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $17,640, 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

Washington posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $37,600, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Dishwashers stands number 75 by employment and number 813 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 2% less than its group median, and it supplies 3.5% of the group's 13,613,500 jobs. In 17 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $33,670, 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 27,820 jobs, 5.9% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

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, $21,600 a year, against $43,810 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $33,670 works out to $2,806 a month before taxes, $1,295 per biweekly paycheck, and $648 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($28,740) to the 75th ($36,750) is worth $8,010 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $37,037 would sit between the median ($33,670) and the 75th percentile ($36,750), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $28,740, is $4,930 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.