Fast Food and Counter Workers
What the pay figures show
- For once the obvious answer is right. California pays fast food and counter workers best, at $42,280. It keeps that lead after tax. It keeps it after local prices too — $31,377 in comparable money. Most jobs are not this tidy.
- The nominal leader for fast food and counter workers is also the real leader: California at $42,280, holding through tax and through price deflation to $31,377. Both adjustments leave the ordering at the top intact, which indicates a wage premium large enough to dominate the state's tax burden and price level rather than merely offset them.
Compare this career across states
Choose your filing status and local taxes, compare pay, and keep a shortlist.Compare wage and personal-pay outcomes by state, with selected resident local taxes and saved career choices.
Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$31,200
People doing it
3,854,050
Highest paid
$42,280
CA
Best off, really
$31,377
CA, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$22,840
Highest tenth
$42,650
Lowest, really
$22,244
MS
States with data
51
National average
$32,150
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
112.58%
CA, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job is fairly steady around the country. Count tax and local prices and the states bunch closer still, from $22,244 to $31,377. For work like this, where you live changes your life more than it changes your pay.
- Roughly 3,854,050 Americans do this job. Hold that scale in mind. A few thousand dollars here is a few thousand dollars across millions of households.
- Every state reports this one. All 51 jurisdictions publish a figure, and the middle wage is $31,200, so the comparison above leaves nobody out.
- Geographic dispersion in fast food and counter workers is moderate by national standards. Tax and price adjustment compress the distribution further, to a real range of $22,244 through $31,377. Where nominal spread is this contained, relocation decisions in the occupation turn on non-wage factors, because the wage differential does not survive the adjustments in a form large enough to drive them.
- With 3,854,050 workers nationally, fast food and counter workers is one of the highest-headcount occupations BLS publishes. Aggregate effects of the differentials described above are correspondingly large, even where the per-worker figures appear modest.
- All 51 jurisdictions publish an occupational median for fast food and counter workers, so the spread described above is a complete national range rather than a range across a reported subset.
Pay band: Fast Food and Counter Workers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $22,840 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $31,200 |
| Top tenth earn over | $42,650 |
| This salary | $31,200 |
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 Fast Food and Counter Workers
The national median for this job
$31,200around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $22,840 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $31,200 |
| Top tenth | $42,650 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Fast Food and Counter Workers, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Mississippi · $22,610 |
|---|---|
| Highest | California · $42,280 |
| Spread | $19,670 |
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 | $27,740 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $28,546 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| CA | $42,280 | $35,325 | $31,377 |
| VT | $36,030 | $30,179 | $31,230 |
| CO | $36,270 | $30,435 | $30,021 |
| WA | $37,710 | $32,480 | $29,918 |
| ME | $34,710 | $28,967 | $29,833 |
| ND | $30,080 | $26,349 | $29,749 |
| SD | $29,490 | $25,875 | $29,372 |
| AZ | $34,230 | $29,231 | $28,911 |
| NV | $31,950 | $27,852 | $28,719 |
| CT | $35,380 | $29,671 | $28,615 |
| MO | $30,390 | $26,107 | $28,451 |
| AK | $33,280 | $28,920 | $28,433 |
| IL | $33,910 | $27,893 | $28,216 |
| DC | $37,430 | $31,175 | $28,135 |
| MT | $29,090 | $24,943 | $27,640 |
| IA | $28,390 | $24,522 | $27,625 |
| NM | $28,700 | $24,931 | $27,583 |
| NE | $29,000 | $24,818 | $27,460 |
| MA | $35,850 | $29,513 | $27,267 |
| OH | $28,430 | $24,957 | $27,182 |
| NY | $35,250 | $29,197 | $27,128 |
| ID | $28,940 | $24,753 | $27,074 |
| WY | $27,860 | $24,553 | $27,026 |
| MN | $31,370 | $26,526 | $26,953 |
| MD | $33,660 | $27,991 | $26,923 |
| HI | $35,250 | $29,178 | $26,866 |
| NJ | $34,150 | $29,109 | $26,735 |
| OR | $35,050 | $27,826 | $26,572 |
| IN | $28,790 | $24,493 | $26,570 |
| WI | $28,600 | $24,603 | $26,428 |
| DE | $31,300 | $26,159 | $26,356 |
| RI | $31,490 | $26,721 | $26,349 |
| AR | $26,250 | $22,706 | $26,248 |
| TN | $27,470 | $24,232 | $26,192 |
| NH | $31,590 | $27,563 | $26,164 |
| NC | $28,570 | $24,505 | $26,030 |
| MI | $28,930 | $24,446 | $25,956 |
| SC | $27,520 | $24,024 | $25,783 |
| KS | $27,580 | $23,072 | $25,645 |
| KY | $27,130 | $23,120 | $25,556 |
| VA | $30,110 | $25,403 | $25,214 |
| UT | $28,670 | $23,941 | $25,200 |
| TX | $27,740 | $24,454 | $25,165 |
| WV | $26,070 | $22,472 | $25,033 |
| PA | $28,570 | $24,259 | $24,881 |
| FL | $29,080 | $25,546 | $24,693 |
| GA | $26,920 | $23,034 | $23,820 |
| OK | $23,430 | $20,351 | $23,051 |
| LA | $22,800 | $20,088 | $22,738 |
| AL | $23,700 | $20,170 | $22,419 |
| MS | $22,610 | $19,417 | $22,244 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of fast food and counter workers 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 $31,200.
- One filer, no dependants, nothing paid into a pension before tax — that is the household behind every take-home figure for fast food and counter workers. It is the simplest case on purpose, so the states can be compared against each other rather than against each other's family circumstances. City income taxes are not counted. On that household, California keeps the most at $35,325.
- Levelling out prices for fast food and counter workers 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 — Mississippi sits at the bottom on $22,244.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for fast food and counter workers, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $31,200, 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.
- The household modeled for fast food and counter workers is a single filer, standard deduction, no dependants, no pre-tax contributions. Holding the household constant is what makes the interstate comparison meaningful; it also means the absolute figures overstate liability for most real filers. On that basis California retains the most, $35,325. Municipal and school-district income taxes are not included in any state.
- The price deflation applied to fast food and counter workers 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 Mississippi at $22,244. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Mississippi anchors the bottom at $22,244 — and the two source series are dated independently.