Sawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Wood Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Sawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Wood worker at that point in the distribution, so $47,770 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

The occupation employed 43,140 people in May 2024, 0.03% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 2,500 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 16.2% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Arkansas, whose location quotient of 4.67 says this work is 4.67 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $35,550 at the 25th percentile, $39,950 at the middle, $47,770 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $26,890, a ratio of 1.9 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, 46 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Oregon at $49,660; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Sawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Wood stands number 411 by employment and number 705 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 13% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.5% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 26 of the 45 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $39,950, 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

Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA is the largest metro employer with 640 jobs, 1.5% 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, Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $41,580 a year, against $49,060 in Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA. 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

The median Sawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Wood paycheck, gross, is $1,537 every two weeks on an annual $39,950, which is $3,329 a month and $768 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($35,550) to the 75th ($47,770) is worth $12,220 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 $43,945 would sit between the median ($39,950) and the 75th percentile ($47,770), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $35,550, is $4,400 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

Sibling occupations in Production Occupations: Miscellaneous Assemblers and Fabricators, First-Line Supervisors of Production and Operating Workers, Inspectors, Testers, Sorters, Samplers, and Weighers, Welders, Cutters, Solderers, and Brazers, Packaging and Filling Machine Operators and Tenders, Machinists. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.