Machinists 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 ($38,100) to the 90th ($78,760). 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

With 298,790 jobs nationally, Machinists make up 0.19% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Michigan alone holds 23,090 of those jobs, the top three states hold 21.9%, and the deepest concentration sits in Michigan (location quotient 2.71, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $78,760, which is 2.1 times the $38,100 at the 10th, a difference of $40,660 annually. Because the mean wage ($57,390) sits above the median ($56,150), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

District of Columbia posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $101,810, and Michigan the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Machinists stands number 121 by employment and number 460 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 22% more than its group median, and it supplies 3.4% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 29 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $56,150, 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

Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI is the largest metro employer with 11,340 jobs, 3.8% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $30,160 a year, against $76,460 in Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $4,679 a month before tax, $2,160 biweekly, $1,080 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($46,250) to the 75th ($64,910) is worth $18,660 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 $61,765 would sit between the median ($56,150) and the 75th percentile ($64,910), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $46,250, is $9,900 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Meat, Poultry, and Fish Cutters and Trimmers, Butchers and Meat Cutters, Multiple Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic, Chemical Equipment Operators and Tenders, Water and Wastewater Treatment Plant and System Operators, Sewing Machine Operators. The full directory is on the Careers hub.