Rolling Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic 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 ($37,090) to the 90th ($67,500). 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 22,350, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. Ohio leads the state table with 1,990 jobs; the top three states sum to 22.9% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Kentucky posts a location quotient of 5.69, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

One in ten workers in this field earns $37,090 or less, and one in ten earns $67,500 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 1.8 to 1 and the annual gap is $30,410. The mean ($50,940) versus median ($48,630) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Ohio first at 1,990 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Louisiana would lead at $64,010. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Rolling Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic stands number 538 by employment and number 556 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 6% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.3% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 21 of the 39 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $48,630, 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

Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN is the largest metro employer with 680 jobs, 3.0% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $49,170 a year, against $58,920 in Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $48,630 a year is $4,052 a month gross, $1,870 every two weeks, $935 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($41,600) to the 75th ($57,730) is worth $16,130 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $4,052 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $53,493 would sit between the median ($48,630) and the 75th percentile ($57,730), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $41,600, is $7,030 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: Mixing and Blending Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Paper Goods Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters, Grinding, Lapping, Polishing, and Buffing Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic, Slaughterers and Meat Packers, Extruding and Drawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.