Upholsterers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Upholsterers offer sit among all 20,990 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 20,990, or 0.01% of the U.S. total. North Carolina leads the state table with 3,860 jobs; the top three states sum to 39.2% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Mississippi posts a location quotient of 15.68, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $37,200 at the 25th percentile, $46,190 at the middle, $51,740 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $31,410, a ratio of 2.0 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

Sorted by employment, the table below puts North Carolina first at 3,860 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Minnesota would lead at $56,840. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Upholsterers stands number 548 by employment and number 616 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 0% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.2% of the group's 8,743,430 jobs. In 14 of the 43 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $46,190, 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

Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton, NC is the largest metro employer with 2,140 jobs, 10.2% 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, Greensboro-High Point, NC posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $48,000 a year, against $62,350 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. 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 Upholsterers paycheck, gross, is $1,777 every two weeks on an annual $46,190, which is $3,849 a month and $888 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($37,200) to the 75th ($51,740) is worth $14,540 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 $50,809 would sit between the median ($46,190) and the 75th percentile ($51,740), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $37,200, is $8,990 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Power Plant Operators, Crushing, Grinding, and Polishing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Computer Numerically Controlled Tool Programmers, Food Cooking Machine Operators and Tenders, Pressers, Textile, Garment, and Related Materials, Jewelers and Precious Stone and Metal Workers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.