Molding, Coremaking, and Casting Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Molding, Coremaking, and Casting Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic offer sit among all 154,820 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

With 154,820 jobs nationally, Molding, Coremaking, and Casting Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic make up 0.10% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Illinois alone holds 13,180 of those jobs, the top three states hold 25.1%, and the deepest concentration sits in Wisconsin (location quotient 3.18, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $36,290 at the 25th percentile, $41,230 at the middle, $49,100 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $28,120, a ratio of 1.9 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 $70,390, and Illinois the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Molding, Coremaking, and Casting Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic stands number 198 by employment and number 685 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 10% less than its group median, and it supplies 1.8% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 29 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $41,230, 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

Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN is the largest metro employer with 10,170 jobs, 6.6% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

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, $26,250 a year, against $55,540 in Ogden, UT. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Molding, Coremaking, and Casting Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic paycheck, gross, is $1,586 every two weeks on an annual $41,230, which is $3,436 a month and $793 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($36,290) to the 75th ($49,100) is worth $12,810 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 $45,353 would sit between the median ($41,230) and the 75th percentile ($49,100), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $36,290, is $4,940 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: Printing Press Operators, 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. The full directory is on the Careers hub.