Fast Food and Counter Workers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Fast Food and Counter Workers ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $27,150. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

With 3,780,930 jobs nationally, Fast Food and Counter Workers make up 2.45% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 438,950 of those jobs, the top three states hold 28.8%, and the deepest concentration sits in Hawaii (location quotient 1.70, 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: $27,150 at the 25th percentile, $30,480 at the middle, $35,440 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $16,180, 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, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is District of Columbia at $38,240; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Fast Food and Counter Workers stands number 3 by employment and number 823 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 12% less than its group median, and it supplies 27.8% 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 $30,480, 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

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 175,790 jobs, 4.6% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 393 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, Aguadilla, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $20,300 a year, against $43,330 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. 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

As a household number, $30,480 a year is $2,540 a month gross, $1,172 every two weeks, $586 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($27,150) to the 75th ($35,440) is worth $8,290 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 $2,540 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 $33,528 would sit between the median ($30,480) and the 75th percentile ($35,440), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $27,150, is $3,330 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

Sibling occupations in Food Preparation and Serving Related Occupations: Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria, Hosts and Hostesses, Restaurant, Lounge, and Coffee Shop, Food Servers, Nonrestaurant, Chefs and Head Cooks, Cooks, Short Order, Food Preparation and Serving Related Workers, All Other. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.