Packers and Packagers, Hand 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 ($27,050) to the 90th ($46,260). 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

BLS counted 601,440 Packers and Packagers, Hand jobs in May 2024, which is 0.39% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in New Jersey, where the location quotient is 4.59, meaning the occupation holds 4.59 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 85,380 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 35.4% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $31,470 at the 25th percentile, $35,580 at the middle, $40,960 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $19,210, 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

New Jersey posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $42,770, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Packers and Packagers, Hand stands number 63 by employment and number 782 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Transportation and Material Moving Occupations, the group median wage is $52,310 across 50 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 32% less than its group median, and it supplies 4.4% of the group's 13,645,590 jobs. In 26 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $35,580, 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 55,160 jobs, 9.2% 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $21,910 a year, against $43,150 in Modesto, CA. 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: $2,965 a month before tax, $1,368 biweekly, $684 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($31,470) to the 75th ($40,960) is worth $9,490 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 $39,138 would sit between the median ($35,580) and the 75th percentile ($40,960), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $31,470, is $4,110 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Transportation and Material Moving Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Air Traffic Controllers, Taxi Drivers, Wellhead Pumpers, Airfield Operations Specialists, Pump Operators, Except Wellhead Pumpers, Railroad Brake, Signal, and Switch Operators and Locomotive Firers. The full directory is on the Careers hub.