Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators worker at that point in the distribution, so $72,970 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 111,930 Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators jobs in May 2024, which is 0.07% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Rhode Island, where the location quotient is 1.75, meaning the occupation holds 1.75 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 11,330 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 25.0% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $47,380 at the 25th percentile, $56,530 at the middle, $72,970 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $31,450, 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

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is District of Columbia at $67,830; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators stands number 247 by employment and number 455 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% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.6% of the group's 18,218,060 jobs. In 25 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $56,530, 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 10,120 jobs, 9.0% 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, Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia, NC-SC posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $53,290 a year, against $62,920 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, 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: $4,711 a month before tax, $2,174 biweekly, $1,087 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($47,380) to the 75th ($72,970) is worth $25,590 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 $62,183 would sit between the median ($56,530) and the 75th percentile ($72,970), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $47,380, is $9,150 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

Sibling occupations in Office and Administrative Support Occupations: Dispatchers, Except Police, Fire, and Ambulance, Office and Administrative Support Workers, All Other, Loan Interviewers and Clerks, Court, Municipal, and License Clerks, Bill and Account Collectors, Interviewers, Except Eligibility and Loan. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.