Molders, Shapers, and Casters, Except 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 Molders, Shapers, and Casters, Except Metal and Plastic ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $38,500. 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 34,750 Molders, Shapers, and Casters, Except Metal and Plastic jobs in May 2024, which is 0.02% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Vermont, where the location quotient is 2.82, meaning the occupation holds 2.82 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 4,090 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 23.1% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $38,500 at the 25th percentile, $45,690 at the middle, $51,340 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $26,100, a ratio of 1.7 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

Hawaii posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $74,780, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Molders, Shapers, and Casters, Except Metal and Plastic stands number 457 by employment and number 630 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 1% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 25 of the 46 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $45,690, 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

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 1,210 jobs, 3.5% 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, Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $45,730 a year, against $54,400 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

The median Molders, Shapers, and Casters, Except Metal and Plastic paycheck, gross, is $1,757 every two weeks on an annual $45,690, which is $3,808 a month and $879 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($38,500) to the 75th ($51,340) is worth $12,840 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 $50,259 would sit between the median ($45,690) and the 75th percentile ($51,340), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $38,500, is $7,190 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: Cutters and Trimmers, Hand, Woodworkers, All Other, Cooling and Freezing Equipment Operators and Tenders, Pourers and Casters, Metal, Textile Bleaching and Dyeing Machine Operators and Tenders, Tool Grinders, Filers, and Sharpeners. The full directory is on the Careers hub.