Graders and Sorters, Agricultural Products 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 Graders and Sorters, Agricultural Products ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $33,550. 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

The occupation employed 26,870 people in May 2024, 0.02% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 6,920 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 47.0% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Mississippi, whose location quotient of 6.54 says this work is 6.54 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $33,550 at the 25th percentile, $35,430 at the middle, $38,010 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $12,790, a ratio of 1.4 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

North Dakota posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $46,290, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Graders and Sorters, Agricultural Products stands number 499 by employment and number 783 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations, the group median wage is $46,710 across 13 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 24% less than its group median, and it supplies 6.1% of the group's 440,980 jobs. In 21 of the 35 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $35,430, 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

Yakima, WA is the largest metro employer with 1,810 jobs, 6.7% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Jackson, MS posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $27,730 a year, against $38,100 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $35,430 works out to $2,952 a month before taxes, $1,363 per biweekly paycheck, and $681 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($33,550) to the 75th ($38,010) is worth $4,460 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 $38,973 would sit between the median ($35,430) and the 75th percentile ($38,010), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $33,550, is $1,880 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Logging Equipment Operators, Agricultural Inspectors, Forest and Conservation Workers, Agricultural Workers, All Other, Fallers, Log Graders and Scalers. The full directory is on the Careers hub.