Grinding, Lapping, Polishing, & Buffing Machine Tool Setters, Operators, & Tenders, Metal & Plastic
What the pay figures show
- Oregon pays this job the most, $57,290. It still pays the most after tax. What it does not do is stay ahead once you count what living there costs. Level that out and North Dakota wins, at $45,706. Same work. A wage that goes further.
- For grinding, lapping, polishing, & buffing machine tool setters, operators, & tenders, metal & plastic, Oregon leads both nominally at $57,290 and after tax — state income tax differentials are not large enough here to disturb the ordering. Regional price parity is: deflating take-home by each state's price level puts North Dakota first at $45,706. The adjustment that matters for this occupation is therefore cost of living rather than tax, which is the opposite of the assumption most relocation comparisons start from.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$46,550
People doing it
67,000
Highest paid
$57,290
OR
Best off, really
$45,706
ND, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$36,110
Highest tenth
$62,600
Lowest, really
$33,416
FL
States with data
48
National average
$48,170
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.57%
ND, 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 $33,416 and $45,706. That is a real difference. It is not usually a moving-house difference.
- This is a small job: about 67,000 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- This job is not published everywhere — 48 jurisdictions have a figure, with $46,550 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. Oregon tops the ones that are.
- Interstate variation for grinding, lapping, polishing, & buffing machine tool setters, operators, & tenders, metal & plastic is contained relative to other occupations, and narrows further under adjustment: the real range is $33,416 to $45,706. 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.
- With 67,000 workers, grinding, lapping, polishing, & buffing machine tool setters, operators, & tenders, metal & plastic is among the smaller occupations BLS publishes. Treat single-state figures as indicative rather than precise; suppression and sampling error both bite harder at this scale.
- 48 jurisdictions carry a published median for grinding, lapping, polishing, & buffing machine tool setters, operators, & tenders, metal & plastic. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Grinding, Lapping, Polishing, & Buffing Machine Tool Setters, Operators, & Tenders, Metal & Plastic
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $36,110 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $46,550 |
| Top tenth earn over | $62,600 |
| This salary | $46,550 |
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 Grinding, Lapping, Polishing, & Buffing Machine Tool Setters, Operators, & Tenders, Metal & Plastic
The national median for this job
$46,550around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $36,110 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $46,550 |
| Top tenth | $62,600 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Grinding, Lapping, Polishing, & Buffing Machine Tool Setters, Operators, & Tenders, Metal & Plastic, state by state
The national median for this job
48states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | New Mexico · $38,020 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Oregon · $57,290 |
| Spread | $19,270 |
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 | $42,250 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $43,478 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ND | $47,670 | $40,483 | $45,706 |
| WV | $49,950 | $40,873 | $45,530 |
| KY | $49,160 | $40,077 | $44,300 |
| NE | $48,500 | $39,647 | $43,868 |
| WY | $46,800 | $39,784 | $43,792 |
| IA | $46,380 | $38,296 | $43,142 |
| VT | $50,640 | $41,429 | $42,872 |
| SC | $48,040 | $39,911 | $42,833 |
| MN | $51,780 | $41,788 | $42,460 |
| IN | $47,310 | $38,827 | $42,119 |
| OR | $57,290 | $43,750 | $41,778 |
| NC | $47,770 | $39,166 | $41,604 |
| WI | $47,330 | $38,730 | $41,602 |
| MO | $46,270 | $38,121 | $41,543 |
| OH | $45,270 | $38,026 | $41,417 |
| TN | $44,710 | $38,104 | $41,187 |
| ID | $45,980 | $37,541 | $41,062 |
| NV | $46,140 | $39,253 | $40,476 |
| PA | $47,650 | $39,004 | $40,004 |
| MS | $42,660 | $34,843 | $39,915 |
| ME | $47,230 | $38,261 | $39,405 |
| MI | $45,460 | $37,026 | $39,312 |
| GA | $45,850 | $37,331 | $38,606 |
| WA | $49,300 | $41,793 | $38,496 |
| MT | $41,740 | $34,513 | $38,244 |
| KS | $42,710 | $34,403 | $38,240 |
| AR | $39,590 | $32,984 | $38,129 |
| SD | $39,060 | $33,565 | $38,101 |
| CT | $48,590 | $39,286 | $37,888 |
| MA | $50,910 | $40,861 | $37,751 |
| UT | $44,320 | $35,819 | $37,703 |
| NH | $46,580 | $39,607 | $37,597 |
| IL | $46,180 | $37,145 | $37,575 |
| CO | $46,120 | $37,917 | $37,400 |
| AZ | $44,990 | $37,607 | $37,196 |
| TX | $42,250 | $36,128 | $37,178 |
| NY | $49,290 | $39,720 | $36,905 |
| LA | $38,650 | $32,462 | $36,745 |
| DE | $44,390 | $35,951 | $36,221 |
| OK | $38,570 | $31,936 | $36,173 |
| RI | $43,650 | $36,036 | $35,534 |
| NM | $38,020 | $32,062 | $35,472 |
| VA | $43,170 | $35,145 | $34,884 |
| AL | $38,170 | $31,226 | $34,707 |
| MD | $43,530 | $35,452 | $34,100 |
| NJ | $44,450 | $36,987 | $33,970 |
| CA | $45,890 | $38,081 | $33,826 |
| FL | $40,310 | $34,569 | $33,416 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for this job as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $46,550, 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 Oregon, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $43,750.
- 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 Florida, on $33,416.
- These are distribution medians for grinding, lapping, polishing, & buffing machine tool setters, operators, & tenders, metal & plastic, with a national value of $46,550. 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 grinding, lapping, polishing, & buffing machine tool setters, operators, & tenders, metal & 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 $43,750, in Oregon. 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 grinding, lapping, polishing, & buffing machine tool setters, operators, & tenders, metal & plastic 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; Florida anchors the distribution at $33,416. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.