Model Makers, Metal and Plastic 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 Model Makers, Metal and Plastic ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $48,860. 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

BLS counted 3,230 Model Makers, Metal and Plastic jobs in May 2024, which is 0.00% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Michigan, where the location quotient is 13.10, meaning the occupation holds 13.10 times its national share of local jobs. Michigan employs the most people outright, 1,210 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 55.7% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $48,860 at the 25th percentile, $62,700 at the middle, $79,470 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $57,350, 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 Michigan first at 1,210 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Georgia would lead at $84,700. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Model Makers, Metal and Plastic stands number 784 by employment and number 365 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 36% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.0% 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 $62,700, 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

Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI is the largest metro employer with 780 jobs, 24.1% 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, Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $73,150 a year, against $73,150 in Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI. 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $5,225 a month before tax, $2,412 biweekly, $1,206 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($48,860) to the 75th ($79,470) is worth $30,610 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 $68,970 would sit between the median ($62,700) and the 75th percentile ($79,470), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $48,860, is $13,840 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: Food Cooking Machine Operators and Tenders, Pressers, Textile, Garment, and Related Materials, Jewelers and Precious Stone and Metal Workers, Prepress Technicians and Workers, Rolling Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic, Upholsterers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.