Production Workers, All Other Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Production Workers, All Other offer sit among all 277,060 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 277,060 Production Workers, All Other jobs in May 2024, which is 0.18% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Tennessee, where the location quotient is 4.23, meaning the occupation holds 4.23 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 37,490 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 31.1% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $35,080 at the 25th percentile, $38,820 at the middle, $47,550 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $29,230, a ratio of 2.0 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

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 37,490 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, District of Columbia would lead at $107,100. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Production Workers, All Other stands number 130 by employment and number 723 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 16% less than its group median, and it supplies 3.2% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 29 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $38,820, 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 14,110 jobs, 5.1% 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $24,920 a year, against $65,530 in Decatur, IL. 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: $3,235 a month before tax, $1,493 biweekly, $747 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($35,080) to the 75th ($47,550) is worth $12,470 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 $42,702 would sit between the median ($38,820) and the 75th percentile ($47,550), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $35,080, is $3,740 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: Prepress Technicians and 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. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.