Office Machine Operators, Except Computer Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Office Machine Operators, Except Computer offer sit among all 24,740 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

BLS counted 24,740 Office Machine Operators, Except Computer jobs in May 2024, which is 0.02% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Delaware, where the location quotient is 2.41, meaning the occupation holds 2.41 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 2,780 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 30.0% of the national total.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $56,340, which is 1.9 times the $29,850 at the 10th, a difference of $26,490 annually. Because the mean wage ($41,620) sits above the median ($39,020), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 2,780 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Alaska would lead at $50,220. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Office Machine Operators, Except Computer stands number 515 by employment and number 717 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 18% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.1% of the group's 18,218,060 jobs. In 22 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $39,020, 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 2,920 jobs, 11.8% 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, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $35,170 a year, against $49,660 in Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV. 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

The median annual wage of $39,020 works out to $3,252 a month before taxes, $1,501 per biweekly paycheck, and $750 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($34,420) to the 75th ($46,680) is worth $12,260 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $42,922 would sit between the median ($39,020) and the 75th percentile ($46,680), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $34,420, is $4,600 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: Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators, Public Safety Telecommunicators, Cargo and Freight Agents, Human Resources Assistants, Except Payroll and Timekeeping, Order Clerks, Library Assistants, Clerical. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.