Extruding and Drawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Extruding and Drawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic worker at that point in the distribution, so $54,360 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

The occupation employed 65,700 people in May 2024, 0.04% of every job BLS counted. Texas is the largest employer at 5,220 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 22.0% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Indiana, whose location quotient of 2.76 says this work is 2.76 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $39,370 at the 25th percentile, $46,980 at the middle, $54,360 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $27,080, a ratio of 1.8 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

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Texas first at 5,220 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Rhode Island would lead at $64,860. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Extruding and Drawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic stands number 338 by employment and number 598 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 0.8% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 26 of the 46 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $46,980, 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 1,880 jobs, 2.9% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 138 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Cleveland, OH posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $40,720 a year, against $64,260 in Pittsburgh, PA. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $46,980 works out to $3,915 a month before taxes, $1,807 per biweekly paycheck, and $903 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($39,370) to the 75th ($54,360) is worth $14,990 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 $51,678 would sit between the median ($46,980) and the 75th percentile ($54,360), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $39,370, is $7,610 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Chemical Equipment Operators and Tenders, Water and Wastewater Treatment Plant and System Operators, Sewing Machine Operators, Mixing and Blending Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Paper Goods Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.