Plating Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, 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 Plating Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $36,620. 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 31,510 jobs nationally, Plating Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic make up 0.02% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 5,580 of those jobs, the top three states hold 36.2%, and the deepest concentration sits in Michigan (location quotient 3.85, 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: $36,620 at the 25th percentile, $41,600 at the middle, $48,990 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $26,380, a ratio of 1.8 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, 40 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Washington at $50,840; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Plating Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic stands number 471 by employment and number 677 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 0.4% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 19 of the 40 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $41,600, 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 3,050 jobs, 9.7% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 102 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $36,940 a year, against $52,680 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Plating Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic paycheck, gross, is $1,600 every two weeks on an annual $41,600, which is $3,467 a month and $800 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($36,620) to the 75th ($48,990) is worth $12,370 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 $45,760 would sit between the median ($41,600) and the 75th percentile ($48,990), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $36,620, is $4,980 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: Structural Metal Fabricators and Fitters, Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Sawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Wood, Engine and Other Machine Assemblers, Print Binding and Finishing Workers, Welding, Soldering, and Brazing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.