Shipping, Receiving, and Inventory Clerks Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Shipping, Receiving, and Inventory Clerks worker at that point in the distribution, so $49,390 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 857,630 people in May 2024, 0.56% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 108,950 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 28.9% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Utah, whose location quotient of 1.60 says this work is 1.60 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $60,300, which is 1.8 times the $32,900 at the 10th, a difference of $27,400 annually. Because the mean wage ($44,890) sits above the median ($43,190), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 108,950 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Washington would lead at $49,290. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Shipping, Receiving, and Inventory Clerks stands number 41 by employment and number 661 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Office and Administrative Support Occupations, the group median wage is $47,850 across 54 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 10% less than its group median, and it supplies 4.7% of the group's 18,218,060 jobs. In 23 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $43,190, 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 37,700 jobs, 4.4% 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $24,660 a year, against $58,370 in Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, 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

Budget arithmetic on the median: $3,599 a month before tax, $1,661 biweekly, $831 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($37,040) to the 75th ($49,390) is worth $12,350 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $47,509 would sit between the median ($43,190) and the 75th percentile ($49,390), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $37,040, is $6,150 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Office and Administrative Support Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Customer Service Representatives, Office Clerks, General, Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Except Legal, Medical, and Executive, First-Line Supervisors of Office and Administrative Support Workers, Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks, Receptionists and Information Clerks. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.