Slaughterers and Meat Packers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Slaughterers and Meat Packers offer sit among all 67,500 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

May 2024 employment stood at 67,500, or 0.04% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 6,830 jobs; the top three states sum to 26.3% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Nebraska posts a location quotient of 11.55, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $49,460, which is 1.6 times the $31,470 at the 10th, a difference of $17,990 annually. Because the mean wage ($40,710) sits above the median ($39,790), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

The state spread for Slaughterers and Meat Packers runs from the $48,080 median in Nebraska down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in California (6,830 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Slaughterers and Meat Packers stands number 333 by employment and number 709 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 14% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.8% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 22 of the 47 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $39,790, 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

Fresno, CA is the largest metro employer with 3,170 jobs, 4.7% 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, Jackson, MS posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $33,990 a year, against $48,470 in Omaha, NE-IA. 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 Slaughterers and Meat Packers paycheck, gross, is $1,530 every two weeks on an annual $39,790, which is $3,316 a month and $765 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($35,940) to the 75th ($45,930) is worth $9,990 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 $43,769 would sit between the median ($39,790) and the 75th percentile ($45,930), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $35,940, is $3,850 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

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Tool Grinders, Filers, and Sharpeners, Nuclear Power Reactor Operators, 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. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.