Prepress Technicians and Workers 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 ($34,270) to the 90th ($65,530). 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

May 2024 employment stood at 23,070, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 2,180 jobs; the top three states sum to 22.9% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Kansas posts a location quotient of 3.52, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $65,530, which is 1.9 times the $34,270 at the 10th, a difference of $31,260 annually. Because the mean wage ($49,130) sits above the median ($47,300), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

The state spread for Prepress Technicians and Workers runs from the $98,780 median in District of Columbia down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in California (2,180 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Prepress Technicians and Workers stands number 528 by employment and number 587 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 3% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.3% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 21 of the 46 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $47,300, 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 1,040 jobs, 4.5% 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, $48,610 a year, against $58,070 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $3,942 a month before tax, $1,819 biweekly, $910 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($39,000) to the 75th ($57,530) is worth $18,530 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 $52,030 would sit between the median ($47,300) and the 75th percentile ($57,530), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $39,000, is $8,300 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

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Jewelers and Precious Stone and Metal Workers, Rolling Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic, Upholsterers, Tire Builders, Textile Winding, Twisting, and Drawing Out Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal-Refining Furnace Operators and Tenders. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.