Gas Plant Operators Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($59,040) to the 90th ($109,350). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

With 15,910 jobs nationally, Gas Plant Operators make up 0.01% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 1,590 of those jobs, the top three states hold 23.2%, and the deepest concentration sits in Wyoming (location quotient 24.04, 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 $59,040 or less, and one in ten earns $109,350 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 1.9 to 1 and the annual gap is $50,310. The mean ($85,470) versus median ($83,400) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Texas first at 1,590 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, California would lead at $124,980. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Gas Plant Operators stands number 601 by employment and number 193 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 81% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.2% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 24 of the 43 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $83,400, 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

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX is the largest metro employer with 820 jobs, 5.2% 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, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $82,470 a year, against $101,400 in Lake Charles, 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 $83,400 works out to $6,950 a month before taxes, $3,208 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,604 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($73,150) to the 75th ($100,000) is worth $26,850 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 $91,740 would sit between the median ($83,400) and the 75th percentile ($100,000), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $73,150, is $10,250 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: Plant and System Operators, All Other, 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. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.