Industrial Machinery Mechanics 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 ($45,090) to the 90th ($92,730). 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

May 2024 employment stood at 421,940, or 0.27% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 57,150 jobs; the top three states sum to 24.4% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Wyoming posts a location quotient of 3.01, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

One in ten workers in this field earns $45,090 or less, and one in ten earns $92,730 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.1 to 1 and the annual gap is $47,640. The mean ($67,160) versus median ($63,760) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average 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 Alaska at $86,590; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Industrial Machinery Mechanics stands number 87 by employment and number 349 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations, the group median wage is $59,300 across 51 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 8% more than its group median, and it supplies 7.0% of the group's 6,045,030 jobs. In 30 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $63,760, 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 18,470 jobs, 4.4% 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, Ponce, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $34,790 a year, against $92,110 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. 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: $5,313 a month before tax, $2,452 biweekly, $1,226 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($52,710) to the 75th ($78,070) is worth $25,360 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 $70,136 would sit between the median ($63,760) and the 75th percentile ($78,070), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $52,710, is $11,050 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations

Sibling occupations in Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations: Outdoor Power Equipment and Other Small Engine Mechanics, Home Appliance Repairers, Coin, Vending, and Amusement Machine Servicers and Repairers, Mechanical Door Repairers, Motorboat Mechanics and Service Technicians, Riggers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.