Cooks, Short Order
What the pay figures show
- Arizona pays cooks, short order the most, at $46,630. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $38,459 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- Arizona leads for cooks, short order at $46,630 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $38,459 in price-deflated terms. That robustness is the minority case: across the largest occupations, state income tax reorders the leader roughly a third of the time and price level does so more often still. Where the nominal leader survives both, the wage premium is large enough to absorb the state's own tax and price levels.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$35,880
People doing it
138,650
Highest paid
$46,630
AZ
Best off, really
$38,459
AZ, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$23,440
Highest tenth
$46,460
Lowest, really
$17,841
PA
States with data
49
National average
$36,120
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
101.11%
AZ, 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 $17,841 to $38,459.
- 138,650 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $35,880. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- This job is not published everywhere — 49 jurisdictions have a figure, with $35,880 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. Arizona tops the ones that are.
- Geographic dispersion in cooks, short order 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 $17,841 to $38,459 — so the variation reflects genuine differences in local labor markets rather than a nominal illusion.
- National employment in cooks, short order is 138,650 — a substantial occupation, though an order of magnitude below the largest. Regional differentials here move real aggregate sums without dominating any single state's wage bill.
- 49 jurisdictions carry a published median for cooks, short order. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Cooks, Short Order
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $23,440 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $35,880 |
| Top tenth earn over | $46,460 |
| This salary | $35,880 |
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, Short Order
The national median for this job
$35,880around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $23,440 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $35,880 |
| Top tenth | $46,460 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Cooks, Short Order, state by state
The national median for this job
49states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Pennsylvania · $19,910 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Arizona · $46,630 |
| Spread | $26,720 |
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 | $25,320 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $26,056 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| AZ | $46,630 | $38,884 | $38,459 |
| RI | $46,250 | $38,027 | $37,498 |
| ID | $40,090 | $33,121 | $36,227 |
| MO | $38,490 | $32,235 | $35,129 |
| NM | $37,150 | $31,400 | $34,740 |
| CO | $42,450 | $35,129 | $34,650 |
| WA | $42,760 | $36,538 | $33,656 |
| NV | $37,780 | $32,536 | $33,549 |
| CT | $42,450 | $34,718 | $33,483 |
| VT | $38,830 | $32,335 | $33,461 |
| OK | $35,130 | $29,327 | $33,218 |
| MA | $44,290 | $35,873 | $33,142 |
| UT | $38,010 | $31,030 | $32,662 |
| IA | $34,090 | $28,888 | $32,543 |
| HI | $43,110 | $34,949 | $32,178 |
| SD | $32,380 | $28,197 | $32,008 |
| AK | $37,780 | $32,536 | $31,988 |
| CA | $42,930 | $35,821 | $31,818 |
| DE | $38,500 | $31,545 | $31,782 |
| DC | $42,450 | $34,908 | $31,504 |
| NJ | $40,720 | $34,191 | $31,401 |
| MT | $33,240 | $28,083 | $31,119 |
| IL | $37,440 | $30,555 | $30,908 |
| MI | $34,510 | $28,693 | $30,465 |
| ME | $35,360 | $29,451 | $30,332 |
| AR | $30,510 | $26,025 | $30,083 |
| KY | $31,840 | $26,767 | $29,587 |
| MD | $36,800 | $30,364 | $29,206 |
| OR | $38,550 | $30,332 | $28,965 |
| NE | $30,530 | $25,993 | $28,761 |
| FL | $34,240 | $29,692 | $28,701 |
| TN | $30,210 | $26,454 | $28,594 |
| NC | $31,290 | $26,582 | $28,237 |
| OH | $29,290 | $25,625 | $27,911 |
| SC | $29,640 | $25,704 | $27,587 |
| MN | $32,150 | $27,111 | $27,547 |
| NY | $35,550 | $29,422 | $27,337 |
| MS | $28,180 | $23,781 | $27,243 |
| NH | $32,330 | $28,157 | $26,729 |
| WV | $27,440 | $23,560 | $26,245 |
| WI | $28,130 | $24,241 | $26,039 |
| VA | $31,200 | $26,216 | $26,021 |
| LA | $26,260 | $22,834 | $25,846 |
| KS | $27,400 | $22,934 | $25,492 |
| GA | $26,870 | $22,995 | $23,780 |
| TX | $25,320 | $22,461 | $23,114 |
| AL | $22,330 | $19,103 | $21,233 |
| IN | $21,940 | $19,060 | $20,676 |
| PA | $19,910 | $17,395 | $17,841 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of cooks, short order 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 $35,880.
- Take-home figures for cooks, short order 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 Arizona, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $38,884.
- Levelling out prices for cooks, short order is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — Pennsylvania sits at the bottom on $17,841.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for cooks, short order, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $35,880, 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, short order 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 $38,884, in Arizona. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- The price deflation applied to cooks, short order uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is Pennsylvania at $17,841. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Pennsylvania anchors the bottom at $17,841 — and the two source series are dated independently.