Heat Treating Equipment Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Heat Treating Equipment Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic offer sit among all 14,590 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 14,590 jobs nationally, Heat Treating Equipment Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic make up 0.01% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 1,940 of those jobs, the top three states hold 33.8%, and the deepest concentration sits in Indiana (location quotient 3.30, 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: $39,900 at the 25th percentile, $47,450 at the middle, $56,330 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $29,030, 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 Texas first at 1,940 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Washington would lead at $64,040. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Heat Treating Equipment Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic stands number 615 by employment and number 583 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 3% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.2% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 20 of the 35 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $47,450, 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 700 jobs, 4.8% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 68 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, Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $44,370 a year, against $53,530 in Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX. 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, $47,450 a year is $3,954 a month gross, $1,825 every two weeks, $912 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($39,900) to the 75th ($56,330) is worth $16,430 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 $3,954 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 $52,195 would sit between the median ($47,450) and the 75th percentile ($56,330), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $39,900, is $7,550 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: Machinists, Production Workers, All Other, Electrical, Electronic, and Electromechanical Assemblers, Except Coil Winders, Tapers, and Finishers, Bakers, Laundry and Dry-Cleaning Workers, Computer Numerically Controlled Tool Operators. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.