First-Line Supervisors of Production and Operating Workers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given First-Line Supervisors of Production and Operating Workers offer sit among all 685,140 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 685,140 First-Line Supervisors of Production and Operating Workers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.44% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Alabama, where the location quotient is 2.08, meaning the occupation holds 2.08 times its national share of local jobs. Texas employs the most people outright, 58,900 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 20.9% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $56,330 at the 25th percentile, $71,190 at the middle, $86,770 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $61,170, a ratio of 2.3 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

The state spread for First-Line Supervisors of Production and Operating Workers runs from the $88,060 median in Wyoming down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in Texas (58,900 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, First-Line Supervisors of Production and Operating Workers stands number 54 by employment and number 280 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 55% more than its group median, and it supplies 7.8% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 26 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $71,190, 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

Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN is the largest metro employer with 22,410 jobs, 3.3% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

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, $49,770 a year, against $106,440 in Baton Rouge, LA. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $71,190 works out to $5,932 a month before taxes, $2,738 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,369 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($56,330) to the 75th ($86,770) is worth $30,440 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 $78,309 would sit between the median ($71,190) and the 75th percentile ($86,770), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $56,330, is $14,860 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

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Gas Plant Operators, Extruding and Forming Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Synthetic and Glass Fibers, Heat Treating Equipment Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic, Textile Knitting and Weaving Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Textile, Apparel, and Furnishings Workers, All Other, Furniture Finishers. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.