Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for this job is Washington, at $49,670. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and Alaska comes out ahead, worth $40,519. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for cooks, institution and cafeteria: Washington leads at $49,670 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting Alaska to $40,519 in real terms. Price level, not tax, is the operative variable for this occupation — and it is the one absent from essentially every published wage comparison.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$37,450
People doing it
441,050
Highest paid
$49,670
WA
Best off, really
$40,519
AK, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$28,480
Highest tenth
$49,670
Lowest, really
$25,154
LA
States with data
51
National average
$38,810
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
101.72%
AK, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Where you do this job matters enormously. The best state pays roughly twice what the worst does. Prices alone cannot explain a gap that size. Level everything out and the range still runs $25,154 to $40,519.
- Roughly 441,050 people hold this job nationally, earning $37,450 in the middle. A solid, ordinary-sized job.
- Coverage is complete — all 51 jurisdictions publish this, on a middle wage of $37,450. Nothing is missing.
- Geographic dispersion in cooks, institution and cafeteria is unusually wide: the top state's median is approximately double the bottom's, a spread that price differentials cannot account for. The real-terms range, after tax and price deflation, still runs $25,154 to $40,519 — so the variation reflects genuine differences in local labor markets rather than a nominal illusion.
- 441,050 are employed nationally in cooks, institution and cafeteria, placing it well inside the reported range without approaching the highest-headcount occupations.
- Coverage for cooks, institution and cafeteria is complete at 51 jurisdictions. No suppression applies, so the highest and lowest figures above are genuinely the national extremes.
Pay band: Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $28,480 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $37,450 |
| Top tenth earn over | $49,670 |
| This salary | $37,450 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria
The national median for this job
$37,450around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $28,480 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $37,450 |
| Top tenth | $49,670 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Louisiana · $25,490 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Washington · $49,670 |
| Spread | $24,180 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $35,360 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $36,388 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| AK | $48,580 | $41,214 | $40,519 |
| VT | $46,370 | $38,141 | $39,469 |
| WA | $49,670 | $42,090 | $38,770 |
| ND | $39,490 | $33,910 | $38,285 |
| RI | $46,570 | $38,273 | $37,740 |
| NH | $45,370 | $38,635 | $36,675 |
| ME | $43,490 | $35,509 | $36,570 |
| MN | $43,460 | $35,594 | $36,166 |
| CT | $46,120 | $37,412 | $36,081 |
| DE | $44,080 | $35,719 | $35,988 |
| SD | $36,730 | $31,693 | $35,975 |
| MA | $47,790 | $38,510 | $35,579 |
| HI | $47,770 | $38,357 | $35,317 |
| WY | $36,940 | $31,861 | $35,071 |
| NV | $39,430 | $33,862 | $34,916 |
| CO | $42,500 | $35,167 | $34,688 |
| WI | $38,650 | $32,183 | $34,570 |
| NY | $45,880 | $37,164 | $34,531 |
| MT | $37,150 | $31,041 | $34,396 |
| OH | $36,720 | $31,391 | $34,191 |
| NM | $36,470 | $30,883 | $34,168 |
| CA | $46,390 | $38,463 | $34,165 |
| IA | $35,810 | $30,204 | $34,027 |
| NJ | $44,520 | $37,040 | $34,018 |
| NE | $36,390 | $30,467 | $33,712 |
| DC | $45,450 | $37,138 | $33,517 |
| TN | $35,570 | $30,760 | $33,249 |
| AZ | $39,660 | $33,458 | $33,092 |
| OR | $44,520 | $34,607 | $33,046 |
| UT | $38,200 | $31,174 | $32,814 |
| IN | $35,980 | $30,058 | $32,607 |
| ID | $35,600 | $29,751 | $32,542 |
| MD | $41,380 | $33,827 | $32,537 |
| MI | $36,870 | $30,489 | $32,372 |
| NC | $36,140 | $30,285 | $32,171 |
| MO | $34,900 | $29,519 | $32,169 |
| SC | $34,960 | $29,873 | $32,061 |
| TX | $35,360 | $30,592 | $31,481 |
| PA | $36,540 | $30,418 | $31,198 |
| VA | $37,890 | $31,207 | $30,975 |
| IL | $37,440 | $30,555 | $30,908 |
| FL | $36,250 | $31,307 | $30,262 |
| GA | $35,090 | $29,223 | $30,220 |
| AR | $30,240 | $25,818 | $29,844 |
| KY | $31,550 | $26,544 | $29,341 |
| KS | $31,950 | $26,358 | $29,298 |
| WV | $29,740 | $25,357 | $28,246 |
| OK | $29,270 | $24,882 | $28,183 |
| MS | $27,390 | $23,162 | $26,534 |
| AL | $27,120 | $22,829 | $25,374 |
| LA | $25,490 | $22,223 | $25,154 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of this job earn less than the figures here and half earn more, and experience, employer and city move an individual a long way from the middle. Nationally the middle earns $37,450.
- Take-home figures for this job assume one person filing alone, with no dependants and nothing going into a pension before tax. Any of those lowers the tax and raises what you keep, so treat these as the plain case rather than your case. Local city income taxes are not included either, and in a few states those matter. In Washington, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $42,090.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for this job. Inside any state, a big city costs far more than a small town, so this is a fair way to compare states with each other and a poor way to price a specific move. The wage figures and the price figures are also from different years. At the bottom of the range sits Louisiana, on $25,154.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for cooks, institution and cafeteria, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $37,450, with half of workers below it; dispersion within a state routinely exceeds the dispersion between states, driven by tenure, employer size, sector and metropolitan area. An individual's position in the distribution is not predictable from geography alone.
- Take-home calculations for cooks, institution and cafeteria assume a single filer with no dependants, the standard deduction, and no pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions. Each omitted item reduces taxable income, so the figures function as a lower bound on retained pay for this household shape; the highest such figure is $42,090, in Washington. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- Real-terms results for cooks, institution and cafeteria rest on statewide regional price parities, which average over intra-state variation that is itself larger than much of the interstate variation. They support comparison between states and not the pricing of an individual relocation; Louisiana anchors the distribution at $25,154. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.