Semiconductor Processing Technicians 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 ($35,980) to the 90th ($87,190). 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

With 32,150 jobs nationally, Semiconductor Processing Technicians make up 0.02% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 7,390 of those jobs, the top three states hold 56.6%, and the deepest concentration sits in Oregon (location quotient 17.27, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $45,320 at the 25th percentile, $51,180 at the middle, $74,640 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $51,210, a ratio of 2.4 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, 19 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Arizona at $78,050; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Semiconductor Processing Technicians stands number 468 by employment and number 503 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 11% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 3 of the 18 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $51,180, 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

Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA is the largest metro employer with 7,820 jobs, 24.3% 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, $43,520 a year, against $75,650 in Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ. 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

As a household number, $51,180 a year is $4,265 a month gross, $1,968 every two weeks, $984 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($45,320) to the 75th ($74,640) is worth $29,320 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 $4,265 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 $56,298 would sit between the median ($51,180) and the 75th percentile ($74,640), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $45,320, is $5,860 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: 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, Model Makers, Metal and Plastic, Fabric and Apparel Patternmakers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.