Extruding and Drawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for this job is Rhode Island, at $61,350. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and Vermont comes out ahead, worth $49,635. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for extruding and drawing machine setters, operators, and tenders, metal and plastic: Rhode Island leads at $61,350 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting Vermont to $49,635 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
$47,720
People doing it
60,840
Highest paid
$61,350
RI
Best off, really
$49,635
VT, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$36,700
Highest tenth
$63,710
Lowest, really
$31,803
ID
States with data
46
National average
$49,480
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
96.64%
VT, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- The state you work in changes what this job pays, but less than you would expect. Level out tax and prices and the whole country sits between $31,803 and $49,635. That is a real difference. It is not usually a moving-house difference.
- Just 60,840 Americans work in this job. Small fields move around more from year to year.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 46 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $47,720. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, Rhode Island pays most.
- Interstate variation for extruding and drawing machine setters, operators, and tenders, metal and plastic is contained relative to other occupations, and narrows further under adjustment: the real range is $31,803 to $49,635. A differential of this magnitude is real but rarely decisive on its own, which is worth stating plainly against wage tables that present nominal gaps without either adjustment.
- 60,840 are employed nationally in extruding and drawing machine setters, operators, and tenders, metal and plastic — a small occupation, where the state spread above is more sensitive to sample composition than it would be in a large one.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for extruding and drawing machine setters, operators, and tenders, metal and plastic in 46 jurisdictions, short of the full set. ⚠️ Absence reflects estimate suppression — small samples or disclosure rules — rather than absence of employment, so the state comparison above is over the published subset.
Pay band: Extruding and Drawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $36,700 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $47,720 |
| Top tenth earn over | $63,710 |
| This salary | $47,720 |
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 Extruding and Drawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic
The national median for this job
$47,720around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $36,700 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $47,720 |
| Top tenth | $63,710 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Extruding and Drawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic, state by state
The national median for this job
46states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Idaho · $34,700 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Rhode Island · $61,350 |
| Spread | $26,650 |
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 | $45,890 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $47,224 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| VT | $59,220 | $47,965 | $49,635 |
| RI | $61,350 | $49,594 | $48,904 |
| SD | $49,620 | $42,050 | $47,732 |
| AR | $50,150 | $41,079 | $47,485 |
| NE | $52,360 | $42,572 | $47,106 |
| NC | $53,330 | $43,412 | $46,114 |
| KY | $50,000 | $40,723 | $45,013 |
| LA | $47,930 | $39,640 | $44,870 |
| WI | $50,230 | $40,917 | $43,951 |
| IN | $49,420 | $40,461 | $43,891 |
| IA | $47,240 | $38,954 | $43,883 |
| TN | $47,550 | $40,386 | $43,654 |
| SC | $49,040 | $40,648 | $43,624 |
| WY | $45,950 | $39,101 | $43,040 |
| PA | $51,150 | $41,709 | $42,778 |
| AL | $47,690 | $38,457 | $42,744 |
| MN | $51,830 | $41,824 | $42,497 |
| OH | $46,340 | $38,856 | $42,321 |
| NM | $45,670 | $37,879 | $41,908 |
| UT | $49,000 | $39,371 | $41,442 |
| MO | $46,050 | $37,954 | $41,362 |
| MS | $44,220 | $36,034 | $41,280 |
| KS | $46,270 | $37,065 | $41,199 |
| CO | $51,110 | $41,706 | $41,138 |
| WV | $44,510 | $36,731 | $40,916 |
| GA | $48,410 | $39,261 | $40,601 |
| NH | $50,210 | $42,524 | $40,366 |
| TX | $45,890 | $39,053 | $40,188 |
| IL | $48,520 | $38,909 | $39,360 |
| CT | $50,230 | $40,527 | $39,085 |
| MI | $45,140 | $36,782 | $39,054 |
| ME | $46,550 | $37,761 | $38,890 |
| NV | $44,210 | $37,703 | $38,877 |
| NJ | $51,180 | $42,023 | $38,595 |
| DE | $46,140 | $37,260 | $37,540 |
| MA | $50,370 | $40,454 | $37,375 |
| AZ | $45,000 | $37,615 | $37,204 |
| WA | $47,230 | $40,129 | $36,964 |
| NY | $48,930 | $39,450 | $36,655 |
| OR | $49,650 | $38,280 | $36,554 |
| MD | $46,730 | $37,872 | $36,427 |
| VA | $45,220 | $36,675 | $36,402 |
| OK | $38,820 | $32,125 | $36,388 |
| CA | $45,880 | $38,074 | $33,819 |
| FL | $39,730 | $34,103 | $32,965 |
| ID | $34,700 | $29,076 | $31,803 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for this job, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $47,720 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- 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 Rhode Island, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $49,594.
- 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 — Idaho sits at the bottom on $31,803.
- All wage figures for extruding and drawing machine setters, operators, and tenders, metal and plastic are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $47,720. Within-state dispersion typically exceeds between-state dispersion in this data, so an individual's expected wage is determined more by experience, sector and employer than by the state comparisons presented here.
- Take-home calculations for extruding and drawing machine setters, operators, and tenders, metal and plastic 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 $49,594, in Rhode Island. 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 extruding and drawing machine setters, operators, and tenders, metal and plastic 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 Idaho at $31,803. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Idaho anchors the bottom at $31,803 — and the two source series are dated independently.