Layout Workers, 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 Layout Workers, Metal and Plastic offer sit among all 5,610 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

BLS counted 5,610 Layout Workers, Metal and Plastic jobs in May 2024, which is 0.00% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Kansas, where the location quotient is 11.27, meaning the occupation holds 11.27 times its national share of local jobs. Virginia employs the most people outright, 790 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 33.3% of the national total.

One in ten workers in this field earns $40,430 or less, and one in ten earns $93,230 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.3 to 1 and the annual gap is $52,800. The mean ($65,770) versus median ($61,870) 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, 17 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Maryland at $99,750; the jobs leader is Virginia:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Layout Workers, Metal and Plastic stands number 752 by employment and number 378 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 34% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.1% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 7 of the 17 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $61,870, 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

Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk, VA-NC is the largest metro employer with 570 jobs, 10.2% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 10 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, Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk, VA-NC posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $70,000 a year, against $76,440 in Wichita, KS. 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

The median Layout Workers, Metal and Plastic paycheck, gross, is $2,380 every two weeks on an annual $61,870, which is $5,156 a month and $1,190 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($51,810) to the 75th ($76,980) is worth $25,170 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $68,057 would sit between the median ($61,870) and the 75th percentile ($76,980), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $51,810, is $10,060 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

Sibling occupations in Production Occupations: Gas Plant Operators, Extruding and Forming Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Synthetic and Glass Fibers, Heat Treating Equipment Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic, Textile Knitting and Weaving Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Textile, Apparel, and Furnishings Workers, All Other, Furniture Finishers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.