Sewing Machine Operators Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Sewing Machine Operators offer sit among all 109,590 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

The occupation employed 109,590 people in May 2024, 0.07% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 14,780 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 27.1% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Mississippi, whose location quotient of 3.18 says this work is 3.18 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $31,200 at the 25th percentile, $36,000 at the middle, $40,810 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $20,200, a ratio of 1.8 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, 50 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Alaska at $42,800; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Sewing Machine Operators stands number 254 by employment and number 777 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 22% less than its group median, and it supplies 1.3% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 27 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $36,000, 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 10,400 jobs, 9.5% 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, Mayaguez, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $19,870 a year, against $44,810 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, 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 $36,000 works out to $3,000 a month before taxes, $1,385 per biweekly paycheck, and $692 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($31,200) to the 75th ($40,810) is worth $9,610 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 $39,600 would sit between the median ($36,000) and the 75th percentile ($40,810), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $31,200, is $4,800 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: Extruding and Drawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic, Woodworking Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Except Sawing, Food Processing Workers, All Other, Extruding, Forming, Pressing, and Compacting Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Tool and Die Makers, Separating, Filtering, Clarifying, Precipitating, and Still Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.