Inspectors, Testers, Sorters, Samplers, and Weighers
What the pay figures show
- Alaska comes first for this job on every measure. $78,150 on paper. Still first after tax. Still first at $62,733 once you adjust for what things cost. When the headline and the reality agree, say so plainly.
- For inspectors, testers, sorters, samplers, and weighers, Alaska's $78,150 median is the highest nominally, after tax, and after regional price adjustment, at $62,733. 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
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
$48,570
People doing it
597,370
Highest paid
$78,150
AK
Best off, really
$62,733
AK, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$35,510
Highest tenth
$77,860
Lowest, really
$36,261
AL
States with data
51
National average
$53,450
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
101.72%
AK, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job roughly doubles depending on the state. That is a lot. Some of it is prices, because dear places pay more to make up for costing more. Most of it is not. In real money the range is still $36,261 to $62,733.
- About 597,370 Americans work in this job, on a middle wage of $48,570. Big enough that where you live changes the arithmetic.
- No gaps here — all 51 jurisdictions publish a number for this job, which sits at $48,570 in the middle.
- Interstate variation in inspectors, testers, sorters, samplers, and weighers pay approaches twofold nominally. The standard explanation — that high-wage states are merely high-cost states — is only partly supported here: after tax and price adjustment the range remains $36,261 to $62,733, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 597,370 workers, inspectors, testers, sorters, samplers, and weighers 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.
- 51 jurisdictions report inspectors, testers, sorters, samplers, and weighers, giving full coverage. The extremes quoted above are therefore the true reported maximum and minimum.
Pay band: Inspectors, Testers, Sorters, Samplers, and Weighers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $35,510 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $48,570 |
| Top tenth earn over | $77,860 |
| This salary | $48,570 |
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 Inspectors, Testers, Sorters, Samplers, and Weighers
The national median for this job
$48,570around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $35,510 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $48,570 |
| Top tenth | $77,860 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Inspectors, Testers, Sorters, Samplers, and Weighers, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Alabama · $40,010 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Alaska · $78,150 |
| Spread | $38,140 |
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 | $46,210 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $47,553 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| AK | $78,150 | $63,809 | $62,733 |
| WY | $57,900 | $48,703 | $53,609 |
| MT | $58,070 | $46,867 | $51,933 |
| WA | $64,420 | $53,941 | $49,687 |
| ND | $50,820 | $43,014 | $48,564 |
| MO | $54,420 | $44,286 | $48,262 |
| MD | $61,790 | $49,257 | $47,378 |
| KS | $53,680 | $42,605 | $47,357 |
| IA | $50,740 | $41,633 | $46,902 |
| CO | $58,350 | $47,205 | $46,562 |
| MN | $57,170 | $45,752 | $46,488 |
| LA | $49,490 | $40,847 | $46,236 |
| NE | $51,270 | $41,746 | $46,192 |
| DE | $57,190 | $45,525 | $45,868 |
| OK | $49,630 | $40,325 | $45,675 |
| SD | $47,240 | $40,137 | $45,561 |
| NM | $49,500 | $40,792 | $45,131 |
| ME | $53,570 | $42,928 | $44,211 |
| RI | $54,940 | $44,684 | $44,062 |
| CT | $57,090 | $45,662 | $44,037 |
| NH | $54,800 | $46,212 | $43,867 |
| WI | $49,610 | $40,449 | $43,449 |
| HI | $59,740 | $47,084 | $43,352 |
| OH | $47,360 | $39,648 | $43,184 |
| DC | $59,730 | $47,737 | $43,082 |
| NV | $49,280 | $41,776 | $43,077 |
| WV | $47,010 | $38,635 | $43,036 |
| AZ | $52,100 | $43,142 | $42,671 |
| IN | $47,900 | $39,284 | $42,615 |
| AR | $44,570 | $36,801 | $42,541 |
| TN | $45,760 | $38,948 | $42,099 |
| SC | $46,890 | $39,063 | $41,924 |
| KY | $46,280 | $37,864 | $41,853 |
| UT | $48,910 | $39,303 | $41,370 |
| PA | $48,320 | $39,522 | $40,535 |
| NC | $46,430 | $38,143 | $40,517 |
| TX | $46,210 | $39,310 | $40,453 |
| ID | $45,130 | $36,903 | $40,365 |
| VA | $49,590 | $39,935 | $39,638 |
| OR | $54,120 | $41,480 | $39,610 |
| CA | $54,300 | $44,360 | $39,402 |
| VT | $46,210 | $38,018 | $39,342 |
| FL | $47,540 | $40,378 | $39,031 |
| IL | $47,920 | $38,456 | $38,902 |
| GA | $46,130 | $37,542 | $38,824 |
| MA | $52,270 | $41,885 | $38,698 |
| MI | $44,490 | $36,288 | $38,528 |
| MS | $40,670 | $33,324 | $38,175 |
| NY | $49,990 | $40,245 | $37,393 |
| NJ | $49,140 | $40,497 | $37,193 |
| AL | $40,010 | $32,624 | $36,261 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of this job 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 $48,570.
- 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 Alaska, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $63,809.
- 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 — Alabama sits at the bottom on $36,261.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for inspectors, testers, sorters, samplers, and weighers, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $48,570, 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 inspectors, testers, sorters, samplers, and weighers 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 $63,809, in Alaska. 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 inspectors, testers, sorters, samplers, and weighers 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 Alabama at $36,261. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Alabama anchors the bottom at $36,261 — and the two source series are dated independently.