Food Cooking Machine Operators and Tenders 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 Food Cooking Machine Operators and Tenders ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $35,310. 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 27,660 jobs nationally, Food Cooking Machine Operators and Tenders make up 0.02% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 2,390 of those jobs, the top three states hold 23.4%, and the deepest concentration sits in Idaho (location quotient 5.15, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $54,170, which is 1.8 times the $30,540 at the 10th, a difference of $23,630 annually. Because the mean wage ($41,930) sits above the median ($40,550), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Texas first at 2,390 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Nebraska would lead at $50,020. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Food Cooking Machine Operators and Tenders stands number 497 by employment and number 696 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 12% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.3% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 17 of the 39 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $40,550, 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 830 jobs, 3.0% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 81 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, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $35,670 a year, against $44,670 in Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN. 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, $40,550 a year is $3,379 a month gross, $1,560 every two weeks, $780 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($35,310) to the 75th ($47,420) is worth $12,110 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 $3,379 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 $44,605 would sit between the median ($40,550) and the 75th percentile ($47,420), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $35,310, is $5,240 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: Extruding, Forming, Pressing, and Compacting Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Tool and Die Makers, Separating, Filtering, Clarifying, Precipitating, and Still Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Structural Metal Fabricators and Fitters, Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Sawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Wood. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.