Plant and System Operators, All Other 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 Plant and System Operators, All Other ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $47,860. 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

With 15,950 jobs nationally, Plant and System Operators, All Other make up 0.01% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 4,080 of those jobs, the top three states hold 46.6%, and the deepest concentration sits in Colorado (location quotient 4.54, 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: $47,860 at the 25th percentile, $61,710 at the middle, $76,910 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $52,500, a ratio of 2.3 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

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 43 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Minnesota at $83,060; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Plant and System Operators, All Other stands number 600 by employment and number 380 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 34% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.2% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 25 of the 43 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $61,710, 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

Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX is the largest metro employer with 1,290 jobs, 8.1% 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, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $58,810 a year, against $71,560 in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA. 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 Plant and System Operators, All Other paycheck, gross, is $2,373 every two weeks on an annual $61,710, which is $5,142 a month and $1,187 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($47,860) to the 75th ($76,910) is worth $29,050 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 $67,881 would sit between the median ($61,710) and the 75th percentile ($76,910), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $47,860, is $13,850 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

Sibling occupations in Production Occupations: Pourers and Casters, Metal, Textile Bleaching and Dyeing Machine Operators and Tenders, Tool Grinders, Filers, and Sharpeners, Nuclear Power Reactor Operators, Layout Workers, Metal and Plastic, Photographic Process Workers and Processing Machine Operators. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.