Millwrights
What the pay figures show
- Two answers for millwrights. Best paid: New Jersey, at $107,540. Tax does not change that. Best off: New Mexico, at $76,579 once local prices count. Tax was not what separated them. Rent was.
- New Jersey's $107,540 median for millwrights survives the tax adjustment intact, so state income tax is not a differentiator in this occupation's geography. It does not survive price deflation: New Mexico takes the top position at $76,579. Housing is where regional price variation concentrates, which is why the reordering appears at this step and not the previous one.
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
$65,700
People doing it
40,330
Highest paid
$107,540
NJ
Best off, really
$76,579
NM, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$46,290
Highest tenth
$93,600
Lowest, really
$41,000
VA
States with data
48
National average
$69,780
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
90.39%
NM, 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 $41,000 to $76,579.
- This is a small job: about 40,330 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 $65,700 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. New Jersey tops the ones that are.
- Interstate variation in millwrights 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 $41,000 to $76,579, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 40,330 workers, millwrights 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 millwrights. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Millwrights
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $46,290 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $65,700 |
| Top tenth earn over | $93,600 |
| This salary | $65,700 |
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 Millwrights
The national median for this job
$65,700around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $46,290 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $65,700 |
| Top tenth | $93,600 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Millwrights, state by state
The national median for this job
48states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Oklahoma · $50,950 |
|---|---|
| Highest | New Jersey · $107,540 |
| Spread | $56,590 |
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 | $62,630 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $64,451 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| NM | $90,230 | $69,216 | $76,579 |
| NJ | $107,540 | $79,824 | $73,312 |
| MI | $89,190 | $68,035 | $72,237 |
| WI | $82,630 | $63,510 | $68,219 |
| KS | $79,690 | $60,734 | $67,508 |
| IN | $77,140 | $60,852 | $66,011 |
| OH | $73,220 | $59,043 | $64,309 |
| CO | $81,440 | $63,248 | $62,386 |
| KY | $70,610 | $56,150 | $62,067 |
| AK | $76,940 | $62,957 | $61,896 |
| MN | $78,570 | $60,285 | $61,254 |
| LA | $66,080 | $53,679 | $60,761 |
| WV | $67,270 | $53,963 | $60,111 |
| NH | $76,190 | $62,430 | $59,262 |
| SD | $61,820 | $51,852 | $58,860 |
| MO | $66,480 | $53,409 | $58,204 |
| WY | $62,780 | $52,624 | $57,925 |
| WA | $76,490 | $62,641 | $57,700 |
| ND | $60,750 | $50,993 | $57,572 |
| CT | $76,810 | $59,391 | $57,278 |
| IA | $62,220 | $50,421 | $56,802 |
| NY | $79,560 | $61,101 | $56,772 |
| ID | $64,710 | $51,598 | $56,438 |
| TN | $61,810 | $51,844 | $56,039 |
| ME | $68,220 | $53,538 | $55,139 |
| NV | $63,040 | $52,833 | $54,478 |
| AL | $61,410 | $48,877 | $54,326 |
| TX | $62,630 | $52,503 | $54,030 |
| NC | $62,990 | $50,788 | $53,950 |
| NE | $60,320 | $48,606 | $53,782 |
| CA | $77,950 | $60,504 | $53,743 |
| SC | $61,700 | $49,981 | $53,641 |
| MT | $60,050 | $48,365 | $53,593 |
| MS | $58,280 | $46,769 | $53,577 |
| VT | $64,180 | $51,623 | $53,421 |
| PA | $64,410 | $51,956 | $53,288 |
| IL | $66,640 | $52,557 | $53,166 |
| AR | $56,310 | $45,800 | $52,943 |
| UT | $63,040 | $50,027 | $52,659 |
| GA | $62,760 | $50,075 | $51,784 |
| OR | $70,700 | $52,931 | $50,545 |
| FL | $62,000 | $51,997 | $50,262 |
| MA | $65,220 | $51,643 | $47,713 |
| DE | $58,770 | $46,707 | $47,058 |
| OK | $50,950 | $41,326 | $46,809 |
| AZ | $57,380 | $47,253 | $46,736 |
| MD | $59,220 | $47,314 | $45,509 |
| VA | $51,430 | $41,307 | $41,000 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for millwrights, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $65,700 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- One filer, no dependants, nothing paid into a pension before tax — that is the household behind every take-home figure for millwrights. 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, New Jersey keeps the most at $79,824.
- The price adjustment for millwrights 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 — Virginia anchors the bottom at $41,000. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- All wage figures for millwrights are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $65,700. 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.
- The household modeled for millwrights 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 New Jersey retains the most, $79,824. Municipal and school-district income taxes are not included in any state.
- Real-terms figures for millwrights 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.