Grinding and Polishing Workers, Hand Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Grinding and Polishing Workers, Hand worker at that point in the distribution, so $48,410 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

With 11,850 jobs nationally, Grinding and Polishing Workers, Hand make up 0.01% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 2,310 of those jobs, the top three states hold 32.1%, and the deepest concentration sits in Rhode Island (location quotient 4.37, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $36,660 at the 25th percentile, $41,690 at the middle, $48,410 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $25,130, a ratio of 1.8 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

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 2,310 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Minnesota would lead at $50,550. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Grinding and Polishing Workers, Hand stands number 665 by employment and number 673 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 9% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.1% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 15 of the 35 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $41,690, 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

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 1,090 jobs, 9.2% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 58 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, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $44,570 a year, against $54,290 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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, $41,690 a year is $3,474 a month gross, $1,603 every two weeks, $802 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($36,660) to the 75th ($48,410) is worth $11,750 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 $3,474 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 $45,859 would sit between the median ($41,690) and the 75th percentile ($48,410), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $36,660, is $5,030 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: Cooling and Freezing Equipment Operators and Tenders, Pourers and Casters, Metal, Textile Bleaching and Dyeing Machine Operators and Tenders, Tool Grinders, Filers, and Sharpeners, Nuclear Power Reactor Operators, Layout Workers, Metal and Plastic. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.