Fabric and Apparel Patternmakers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Fabric and Apparel Patternmakers worker at that point in the distribution, so $91,080 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 2,860 people in May 2024, 0.00% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 910 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 68.9% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in New York, whose location quotient of 4.53 says this work is 4.53 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $112,540, which is 3.3 times the $34,590 at the 10th, a difference of $77,950 annually. Because the mean wage ($71,630) sits above the median ($67,670), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 12 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is New York at $100,350; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Fabric and Apparel Patternmakers stands number 792 by employment and number 301 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 47% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.0% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 4 of the 12 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $67,670, 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 780 jobs, 27.3% 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, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $74,780 a year, against $99,400 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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 Fabric and Apparel Patternmakers paycheck, gross, is $2,603 every two weeks on an annual $67,670, which is $5,639 a month and $1,301 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($44,110) to the 75th ($91,080) is worth $46,970 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $74,437 would sit between the median ($67,670) and the 75th percentile ($91,080), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $44,110, is $23,560 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: Inspectors, Testers, Sorters, Samplers, and Weighers, Welders, Cutters, Solderers, and Brazers, Packaging and Filling Machine Operators and Tenders, Machinists, Production Workers, All Other, Electrical, Electronic, and Electromechanical Assemblers, Except Coil Winders, Tapers, and Finishers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.