Laundry and Dry-Cleaning Workers
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for laundry and dry-cleaning workers is Washington, at $39,590. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and North Dakota comes out ahead, worth $36,453. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for laundry and dry-cleaning workers: Washington leads at $39,590 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting North Dakota to $36,453 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
$34,890
People doing it
198,040
Highest paid
$39,590
WA
Best off, really
$36,453
ND, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$27,440
Highest tenth
$43,190
Lowest, really
$26,354
MS
States with data
51
National average
$34,920
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 $26,354 and $36,453. That is a real difference. It is not usually a moving-house difference.
- 198,040 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $34,890. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- Coverage is complete — all 51 jurisdictions publish this, on a middle wage of $34,890. Nothing is missing.
- Interstate variation for laundry and dry-cleaning workers is contained relative to other occupations, and narrows further under adjustment: the real range is $26,354 to $36,453. 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.
- National employment in laundry and dry-cleaning workers is 198,040 — a substantial occupation, though an order of magnitude below the largest. Regional differentials here move real aggregate sums without dominating any single state's wage bill.
- Coverage for laundry and dry-cleaning workers is complete at 51 jurisdictions. No suppression applies, so the highest and lowest figures above are genuinely the national extremes.
Pay band: Laundry and Dry-Cleaning Workers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $27,440 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $34,890 |
| Top tenth earn over | $43,190 |
| This salary | $34,890 |
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 Laundry and Dry-Cleaning Workers
The national median for this job
$34,890around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $27,440 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $34,890 |
| Top tenth | $43,190 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Laundry and Dry-Cleaning Workers, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Mississippi · $27,190 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Washington · $39,590 |
| Spread | $12,400 |
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 | $29,630 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $30,491 |
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 | $37,470 | $32,287 | $36,453 |
| MT | $36,250 | $30,360 | $33,642 |
| IA | $34,050 | $28,857 | $32,509 |
| SD | $32,780 | $28,519 | $32,373 |
| NE | $34,790 | $29,254 | $32,370 |
| NV | $36,210 | $31,275 | $32,249 |
| VT | $37,300 | $31,157 | $32,242 |
| WI | $35,700 | $29,958 | $32,180 |
| ID | $35,140 | $29,406 | $32,164 |
| ME | $37,380 | $30,957 | $31,883 |
| MN | $37,580 | $31,184 | $31,685 |
| MO | $33,870 | $28,740 | $31,320 |
| WA | $39,590 | $33,991 | $31,310 |
| TN | $33,220 | $28,872 | $31,208 |
| CO | $37,680 | $31,506 | $31,077 |
| MI | $35,100 | $29,142 | $30,941 |
| UT | $35,690 | $29,269 | $30,809 |
| RI | $37,230 | $31,118 | $30,685 |
| AZ | $36,500 | $30,998 | $30,659 |
| AK | $36,050 | $31,146 | $30,621 |
| NH | $36,860 | $31,797 | $30,184 |
| NM | $30,850 | $26,589 | $29,418 |
| CT | $36,310 | $30,331 | $29,252 |
| PA | $34,060 | $28,502 | $29,232 |
| IL | $35,220 | $28,881 | $29,215 |
| OH | $30,520 | $26,580 | $28,950 |
| NC | $31,920 | $27,063 | $28,748 |
| OR | $37,800 | $29,795 | $28,452 |
| MA | $37,490 | $30,749 | $28,408 |
| DC | $37,790 | $31,443 | $28,377 |
| IN | $30,930 | $26,149 | $28,366 |
| CA | $37,790 | $31,897 | $28,332 |
| SC | $30,470 | $26,355 | $28,285 |
| AR | $28,460 | $24,451 | $28,265 |
| DE | $33,730 | $27,977 | $28,187 |
| NJ | $36,050 | $30,602 | $28,105 |
| KS | $30,120 | $24,989 | $27,777 |
| WY | $28,630 | $25,184 | $27,721 |
| MD | $34,710 | $28,784 | $27,687 |
| WV | $28,970 | $24,763 | $27,584 |
| KY | $29,220 | $24,753 | $27,361 |
| OK | $28,170 | $24,041 | $27,231 |
| FL | $32,340 | $28,165 | $27,225 |
| HI | $35,690 | $29,502 | $27,163 |
| NY | $35,050 | $29,047 | $26,989 |
| LA | $27,460 | $23,786 | $26,924 |
| TX | $29,630 | $25,988 | $26,743 |
| VA | $32,140 | $26,917 | $26,717 |
| GA | $30,580 | $25,824 | $26,705 |
| AL | $28,370 | $23,799 | $26,452 |
| MS | $27,190 | $23,005 | $26,354 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of laundry and dry-cleaning 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 $34,890.
- Take-home figures for laundry and dry-cleaning workers 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 Washington, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $33,991.
- The price adjustment for laundry and dry-cleaning workers uses a statewide figure, and states are not uniform. A city and a rural county in the same state can differ more from each other than two states do, so treat the real-terms comparison as a direction rather than a precise answer — Mississippi anchors the bottom at $26,354. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for laundry and dry-cleaning workers, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $34,890, 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 laundry and dry-cleaning workers 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 $33,991, in Washington. 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 figures for laundry and dry-cleaning workers deflate take-home by a statewide regional price parity, which conceals substantial intra-state variation — metropolitan and non-metropolitan price levels within one state frequently differ by more than two states differ from each other. The wage and price series also carry different reference periods, as each is published on its own schedule, so the adjustment is directionally sound rather than precisely dated.