Inspectors, Testers, Sorters, Samplers, and Weighers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Inspectors, Testers, Sorters, Samplers, and Weighers offer sit among all 591,180 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

The occupation employed 591,180 people in May 2024, 0.38% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 60,280 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 24.8% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Indiana, whose location quotient of 1.79 says this work is 1.79 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

One in ten workers in this field earns $34,590 or less, and one in ten earns $75,510 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.2 to 1 and the annual gap is $40,920. The mean ($51,670) versus median ($47,460) 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 California first at 60,280 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Alaska would lead at $98,800. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Inspectors, Testers, Sorters, Samplers, and Weighers stands number 65 by employment and number 582 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 6.8% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 34 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $47,460, 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 22,770 jobs, 3.9% 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, Auburn-Opelika, AL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $38,480 a year, against $70,230 in Bridgeport-Stamford-Danbury, CT. 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

As a household number, $47,460 a year is $3,955 a month gross, $1,825 every two weeks, $913 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($38,740) to the 75th ($59,970) is worth $21,230 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 $3,955 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 $52,206 would sit between the median ($47,460) and the 75th percentile ($59,970), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $38,740, is $8,720 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: Sewing Machine Operators, Mixing and Blending Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Paper Goods Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters, Grinding, Lapping, Polishing, and Buffing Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic, Slaughterers and Meat Packers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.