Dining Room and Cafeteria Attendants and Bartender Helpers
What the pay figures show
- Hawaii comes first for this job on every measure. $51,200 on paper. Still first after tax. Still first at $37,627 once you adjust for what things cost. When the headline and the reality agree, say so plainly.
- For dining room and cafeteria attendants and bartender helpers, Hawaii's $51,200 median is the highest nominally, after tax, and after regional price adjustment, at $37,627. Concordance across all three measures is uncommon and worth stating explicitly, because the absence of a reordering is itself the finding for this occupation.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$33,980
People doing it
542,750
Highest paid
$51,200
HI
Best off, really
$37,627
HI, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$21,300
Highest tenth
$46,570
Lowest, really
$19,919
TX
States with data
51
National average
$34,230
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
108.61%
HI, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Geography does a lot of the work in this job. Pay roughly doubles between the lowest state and the highest. Tax and prices narrow that gap. They come nowhere near closing it — the real range is still $19,919 up to $37,627.
- About 542,750 Americans work in this job, on a middle wage of $33,980. Big enough that where you live changes the arithmetic.
- Every state reports this one. All 51 jurisdictions publish a figure, and the middle wage is $33,980, so the comparison above leaves nobody out.
- The nominal spread for dining room and cafeteria attendants and bartender helpers approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $19,919 to $37,627, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- With 542,750 workers, dining room and cafeteria attendants and bartender helpers sits in the middle of the BLS headcount distribution. The state-level spread described above therefore applies to a meaningful population rather than a niche one.
- All 51 jurisdictions publish an occupational median for dining room and cafeteria attendants and bartender helpers, so the spread described above is a complete national range rather than a range across a reported subset.
Pay band: Dining Room and Cafeteria Attendants and Bartender Helpers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $21,300 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $33,980 |
| Top tenth earn over | $46,570 |
| This salary | $33,980 |
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 Dining Room and Cafeteria Attendants and Bartender Helpers
The national median for this job
$33,980around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $21,300 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $33,980 |
| Top tenth | $46,570 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Dining Room and Cafeteria Attendants and Bartender Helpers, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Texas · $21,550 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Hawaii · $51,200 |
| Spread | $29,650 |
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 | $21,550 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $22,176 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| HI | $51,200 | $40,866 | $37,627 |
| ME | $38,560 | $31,837 | $32,789 |
| WA | $41,420 | $35,461 | $32,664 |
| AZ | $36,500 | $30,998 | $30,659 |
| ND | $31,010 | $27,097 | $30,593 |
| CO | $36,790 | $30,830 | $30,410 |
| SD | $29,920 | $26,221 | $29,764 |
| VT | $34,120 | $28,709 | $29,708 |
| MO | $31,850 | $27,212 | $29,655 |
| MD | $37,020 | $30,531 | $29,366 |
| DC | $39,080 | $32,402 | $29,243 |
| NE | $30,690 | $26,116 | $28,897 |
| NY | $36,740 | $30,314 | $28,166 |
| NM | $29,360 | $25,440 | $28,146 |
| CT | $34,540 | $29,079 | $28,044 |
| OH | $29,400 | $25,711 | $28,004 |
| FL | $33,280 | $28,920 | $27,955 |
| TN | $29,470 | $25,859 | $27,951 |
| OR | $36,800 | $29,079 | $27,768 |
| AR | $27,670 | $23,827 | $27,544 |
| IA | $28,210 | $24,381 | $27,466 |
| MI | $30,390 | $25,558 | $27,136 |
| CA | $36,010 | $30,538 | $27,125 |
| MA | $35,380 | $29,159 | $26,940 |
| VA | $32,410 | $27,118 | $26,917 |
| DE | $31,880 | $26,593 | $26,793 |
| NJ | $34,170 | $29,125 | $26,749 |
| LA | $26,780 | $23,246 | $26,313 |
| MT | $27,510 | $23,728 | $26,293 |
| IN | $28,320 | $24,126 | $26,171 |
| IL | $31,200 | $25,850 | $26,149 |
| ID | $27,810 | $23,891 | $26,132 |
| RI | $31,200 | $26,499 | $26,130 |
| OK | $26,830 | $22,998 | $26,049 |
| WV | $27,150 | $23,331 | $25,989 |
| PA | $29,310 | $24,831 | $25,467 |
| GA | $28,920 | $24,573 | $25,412 |
| MN | $29,210 | $24,906 | $25,307 |
| NC | $27,560 | $23,715 | $25,191 |
| SC | $26,830 | $23,469 | $25,188 |
| WI | $27,080 | $23,422 | $25,159 |
| NV | $27,460 | $24,223 | $24,978 |
| KY | $26,330 | $22,489 | $24,858 |
| KS | $26,300 | $22,088 | $24,552 |
| WY | $24,600 | $21,868 | $24,071 |
| UT | $27,010 | $22,651 | $23,842 |
| AK | $27,040 | $23,877 | $23,475 |
| MS | $23,180 | $19,864 | $22,755 |
| NH | $26,290 | $23,260 | $22,080 |
| AL | $22,470 | $19,212 | $21,354 |
| TX | $21,550 | $19,356 | $19,919 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for this job as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $33,980, which means half of everyone doing this work earns less than that. Where you land depends on how long you have done it, who you do it for, and which city you do it in.
- 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 Hawaii, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $40,866.
- Levelling out prices for this job 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 — Texas sits at the bottom on $19,919.
- These are distribution medians for dining room and cafeteria attendants and bartender helpers, with a national value of $33,980. They describe a midpoint rather than an expected offer, and the within-occupation spread — visible in the tenth and ninetieth percentile figures — is wide enough that a state-level median is a weak predictor for any individual worker.
- Take-home calculations for dining room and cafeteria attendants and bartender helpers 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 $40,866, in Hawaii. 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 dining room and cafeteria attendants and bartender helpers 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 Texas at $19,919. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Texas anchors the bottom at $19,919 — and the two source series are dated independently.