Food Preparation Workers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Food Preparation Workers offer sit among all 888,770 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

With 888,770 jobs nationally, Food Preparation Workers make up 0.58% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 106,040 of those jobs, the top three states hold 30.6%, and the deepest concentration sits in Louisiana (location quotient 3.19, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

One in ten workers in this field earns $23,490 or less, and one in ten earns $44,260 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 1.9 to 1 and the annual gap is $20,770. The mean ($33,940) versus median ($34,220) comparison shows an unusually symmetric ladder in this occupation.

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 Washington at $38,950; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Food Preparation Workers stands number 39 by employment and number 807 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 1% less than its group median, and it supplies 6.5% of the group's 13,613,500 jobs. In 21 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $34,220, 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 54,130 jobs, 6.1% 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, $22,340 a year, against $47,010 in Kahului-Wailuku, HI. 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $2,852 a month before tax, $1,316 biweekly, $658 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($28,740) to the 75th ($37,540) is worth $8,800 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $37,642 would sit between the median ($34,220) and the 75th percentile ($37,540), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $28,740, is $5,480 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: Food Servers, Nonrestaurant, Chefs and Head Cooks, Cooks, Short Order, Food Preparation and Serving Related Workers, All Other, Cooks, All Other, Cooks, Private Household. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.