Maintenance Workers, Machinery Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Maintenance Workers, Machinery ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $48,600. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 56,540 people in May 2024, 0.04% of every job BLS counted. Texas is the largest employer at 8,850 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 29.2% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Wyoming, whose location quotient of 3.05 says this work is 3.05 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $83,560, which is 2.1 times the $40,080 at the 10th, a difference of $43,480 annually. Because the mean wage ($61,820) sits above the median ($60,500), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Wyoming posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $85,830, and Texas the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Maintenance Workers, Machinery stands number 369 by employment and number 401 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 2% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.9% of the group's 6,045,030 jobs. In 25 of the 48 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $60,500, 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

Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX is the largest metro employer with 2,440 jobs, 4.3% 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 Antonio-New Braunfels, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $55,740 a year, against $79,920 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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

As a household number, $60,500 a year is $5,042 a month gross, $2,327 every two weeks, $1,163 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($48,600) to the 75th ($72,260) is worth $23,660 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 $5,042 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 $66,550 would sit between the median ($60,500) and the 75th percentile ($72,260), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $48,600, is $11,900 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Electrical and Electronics Installers and Repairers, Transportation Equipment, Musical Instrument Repairers and Tuners, Commercial Divers, Manufactured Building and Mobile Home Installers, Camera and Photographic Equipment Repairers, Watch and Clock Repairers. The full directory is on the Careers hub.