Power Plant Operators
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for power plant operators is Washington, at $131,620. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and North Dakota comes out ahead, worth $105,721. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for power plant operators: Washington leads at $131,620 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting North Dakota to $105,721 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
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
$102,040
People doing it
29,320
Highest paid
$131,620
WA
Best off, really
$105,721
ND, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$61,790
Highest tenth
$131,940
Lowest, really
$56,723
WI
States with data
49
National average
$99,790
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.57%
ND, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Where you do this job matters enormously. The best state pays roughly twice what the worst does. Prices alone cannot explain a gap that size. Level everything out and the range still runs $56,723 to $105,721.
- Just 29,320 Americans work in this job. Small fields move around more from year to year.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 49 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $102,040. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, Washington pays most.
- Geographic dispersion in power plant operators is unusually wide: the top state's median is approximately double the bottom's, a spread that price differentials cannot account for. The real-terms range, after tax and price deflation, still runs $56,723 to $105,721 — so the variation reflects genuine differences in local labor markets rather than a nominal illusion.
- 29,320 are employed nationally in power plant operators — a small occupation, where the state spread above is more sensitive to sample composition than it would be in a large one.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for power plant operators in 49 jurisdictions, short of the full set. ⚠️ Absence reflects estimate suppression — small samples or disclosure rules — rather than absence of employment, so the state comparison above is over the published subset.
Pay band: Power Plant Operators
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $61,790 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $102,040 |
| Top tenth earn over | $131,940 |
| This salary | $102,040 |
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 Power Plant Operators
The national median for this job
$102,040around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $61,790 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $102,040 |
| Top tenth | $131,940 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Power Plant Operators, state by state
The national median for this job
49states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Wisconsin · $66,080 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Washington · $131,620 |
| Spread | $65,540 |
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 | $102,510 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $105,490 |
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 | $122,160 | $93,639 | $105,721 |
| NV | $131,400 | $101,078 | $104,226 |
| ID | $124,440 | $90,579 | $99,074 |
| TN | $115,920 | $90,380 | $97,692 |
| WA | $131,620 | $101,228 | $93,245 |
| AL | $107,080 | $79,708 | $88,594 |
| MS | $102,400 | $76,864 | $88,054 |
| IN | $107,000 | $80,978 | $87,843 |
| NM | $105,510 | $79,217 | $87,643 |
| LA | $101,170 | $77,354 | $87,559 |
| MT | $106,040 | $78,799 | $87,317 |
| NJ | $131,370 | $94,879 | $87,139 |
| OH | $104,160 | $79,959 | $87,089 |
| WY | $99,200 | $78,617 | $86,537 |
| NC | $108,300 | $81,207 | $86,262 |
| AR | $97,760 | $74,446 | $86,056 |
| IA | $100,500 | $76,325 | $85,983 |
| MI | $105,820 | $79,028 | $83,908 |
| UT | $107,120 | $79,422 | $83,600 |
| MO | $101,900 | $76,665 | $83,547 |
| TX | $102,510 | $80,946 | $83,299 |
| GA | $107,580 | $79,743 | $82,465 |
| NE | $98,210 | $74,156 | $82,052 |
| WV | $97,210 | $73,654 | $82,046 |
| HI | $121,700 | $86,640 | $79,772 |
| MD | $111,260 | $82,088 | $78,958 |
| KY | $93,400 | $71,386 | $78,907 |
| IL | $104,440 | $77,279 | $78,174 |
| OK | $88,590 | $67,667 | $76,645 |
| DE | $103,010 | $75,730 | $76,300 |
| CO | $102,780 | $77,322 | $76,268 |
| PA | $95,800 | $73,284 | $75,163 |
| OR | $109,830 | $77,035 | $73,563 |
| RI | $98,050 | $74,503 | $73,466 |
| NY | $106,990 | $78,825 | $73,240 |
| FL | $94,290 | $75,163 | $72,655 |
| MN | $94,390 | $70,338 | $71,470 |
| CT | $97,460 | $72,783 | $70,193 |
| AK | $88,870 | $71,350 | $70,147 |
| MA | $100,140 | $74,591 | $68,914 |
| CA | $105,210 | $77,153 | $68,531 |
| KS | $79,980 | $60,922 | $67,717 |
| SC | $79,900 | $62,058 | $66,602 |
| AZ | $84,970 | $66,885 | $66,154 |
| ME | $81,060 | $61,702 | $63,547 |
| VT | $78,240 | $60,818 | $62,936 |
| NH | $81,070 | $65,863 | $62,521 |
| VA | $73,640 | $57,162 | $56,737 |
| WI | $66,080 | $52,807 | $56,723 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for power plant operators as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $102,040, 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 power plant operators 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 $101,228.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for power plant operators. 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 Wisconsin, on $56,723.
- These are distribution medians for power plant operators, with a national value of $102,040. 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 power plant operators 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 $101,228, 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 results for power plant operators 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; Wisconsin anchors the distribution at $56,723. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.