Meter Readers, Utilities 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 ($33,980) to the 90th ($86,480). 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

The occupation employed 19,620 people in May 2024, 0.01% of every job BLS counted. Ohio is the largest employer at 1,680 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 21.0% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in West Virginia, whose location quotient of 4.53 says this work is 4.53 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $39,620 at the 25th percentile, $49,180 at the middle, $68,030 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $52,500, a ratio of 2.5 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Ohio first at 1,680 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Wisconsin would lead at $87,610. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Meter Readers, Utilities stands number 566 by employment and number 540 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Office and Administrative Support Occupations, the group median wage is $47,850 across 54 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 3% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.1% of the group's 18,218,060 jobs. In 27 of the 47 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $49,180, 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

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 1,320 jobs, 6.7% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 105 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, New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $73,230 a year, against $73,230 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $4,098 a month before tax, $1,892 biweekly, $946 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($39,620) to the 75th ($68,030) is worth $28,410 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 $54,098 would sit between the median ($49,180) and the 75th percentile ($68,030), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $39,620, is $9,560 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Office and Administrative Support Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Court, Municipal, and License Clerks, Bill and Account Collectors, Interviewers, Except Eligibility and Loan, Payroll and Timekeeping Clerks, Eligibility Interviewers, Government Programs, Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.