Power Plant Operators 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 ($59,930) to the 90th ($128,760). 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

The occupation employed 30,720 people in May 2024, 0.02% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 2,390 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 21.5% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Alaska, whose location quotient of 11.67 says this work is 11.67 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $68,830 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($128,760) is 2.1 times the 10th percentile ($59,930), a gap of $68,830 a year. The mean of $95,990 sitting near the median of $99,670 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 2,390 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Washington would lead at $124,050. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Power Plant Operators stands number 479 by employment and number 129 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 117% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 25 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $99,670, 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 1,250 jobs, 4.1% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 108 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, Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $98,930 a year, against $122,870 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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 Power Plant Operators paycheck, gross, is $3,833 every two weeks on an annual $99,670, which is $8,306 a month and $1,917 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($77,400) to the 75th ($111,980) is worth $34,580 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 $109,637 would sit between the median ($99,670) and the 75th percentile ($111,980), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $77,400, is $22,270 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Tool Grinders, Filers, and Sharpeners, Nuclear Power Reactor Operators, Layout Workers, Metal and Plastic, Photographic Process Workers and Processing Machine Operators, Drilling and Boring Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic, Shoe Machine Operators and Tenders. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.