Separating, Filtering, Clarifying, Precipitating, and Still Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders 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 ($35,810) to the 90th ($75,860). 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

BLS counted 54,200 Separating, Filtering, Clarifying, Precipitating, and Still Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders jobs in May 2024, which is 0.04% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Wyoming, where the location quotient is 3.73, meaning the occupation holds 3.73 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 11,030 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 30.4% of the national total.

One in ten workers in this field earns $35,810 or less, and one in ten earns $75,860 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.1 to 1 and the annual gap is $40,050. The mean ($53,830) versus median ($49,500) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Wyoming at $105,470; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Separating, Filtering, Clarifying, Precipitating, and Still Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders stands number 374 by employment and number 528 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 8% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.6% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 24 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $49,500, 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 1,870 jobs, 3.5% 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, Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $49,750 a year, against $78,010 in Napa, CA. 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

The median annual wage of $49,500 works out to $4,125 a month before taxes, $1,904 per biweekly paycheck, and $952 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($41,830) to the 75th ($61,350) is worth $19,520 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $54,450 would sit between the median ($49,500) and the 75th percentile ($61,350), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $41,830, is $7,670 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: Shoe Machine Operators and Tenders, Model Makers, Metal and Plastic, Fabric and Apparel Patternmakers, Sewers, Hand, Patternmakers, Metal and Plastic, Model Makers, Wood. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.