Print Binding and Finishing Workers
What the pay figures show
- The District of Columbia pays print binding and finishing workers the most, $108,080. 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 Mississippi wins, at $80,035. Same work. A wage that goes further.
- For print binding and finishing workers, the District of Columbia leads both nominally at $108,080 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 Mississippi first at $80,035. 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
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
$42,290
People doing it
33,180
Highest paid
$108,080
DC
Best off, really
$80,035
MS, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$32,220
Highest tenth
$59,150
Lowest, really
$28,163
NM
States with data
50
National average
$44,460
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
87.29%
MS, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Geography does a lot of the work in this job. Pay roughly doubles between the lowest state and the highest. Tax and prices narrow that gap. They come nowhere near closing it — the real range is still $28,163 up to $80,035.
- Only 33,180 people do this job in the whole country. It is a small field, so the pay figures rest on fewer reports.
- This job is not published everywhere — 50 jurisdictions have a figure, with $42,290 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. The District of Columbia tops the ones that are.
- The nominal spread for print binding and finishing workers approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $28,163 to $80,035, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- National employment in print binding and finishing workers is 33,180. ⚠️ At this headcount the state-level medians rest on comparatively thin samples, and year-to-year movement in any one state reflects sampling as much as wages.
- 50 jurisdictions carry a published median for print binding and finishing workers. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Print Binding and Finishing Workers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $32,220 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $42,290 |
| Top tenth earn over | $59,150 |
| This salary | $42,290 |
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 Print Binding and Finishing Workers
The national median for this job
$42,290around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $32,220 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $42,290 |
| Top tenth | $59,150 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Print Binding and Finishing Workers, state by state
The national median for this job
50states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | New Mexico · $29,380 |
|---|---|
| Highest | District of Columbia · $108,080 |
| Spread | $78,700 |
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 | $37,310 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $38,395 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| MS | $91,850 | $69,864 | $80,035 |
| DC | $108,080 | $78,646 | $70,978 |
| AK | $57,200 | $48,140 | $47,329 |
| ND | $48,760 | $41,359 | $46,695 |
| VT | $48,930 | $40,112 | $41,509 |
| SD | $41,350 | $35,405 | $40,189 |
| ME | $48,230 | $38,997 | $40,163 |
| OH | $43,680 | $36,792 | $40,073 |
| MN | $48,390 | $39,291 | $39,923 |
| AR | $41,040 | $34,096 | $39,413 |
| NH | $48,850 | $41,431 | $39,329 |
| IL | $47,880 | $38,426 | $38,871 |
| WI | $43,400 | $35,766 | $38,418 |
| WV | $41,340 | $34,311 | $38,220 |
| CT | $47,750 | $38,648 | $37,273 |
| CO | $45,780 | $37,658 | $37,145 |
| SC | $40,820 | $34,461 | $36,984 |
| IA | $38,790 | $32,486 | $36,596 |
| RI | $45,050 | $37,108 | $36,592 |
| PA | $43,010 | $35,418 | $36,326 |
| ID | $40,200 | $33,203 | $36,318 |
| KY | $39,620 | $32,746 | $36,196 |
| AL | $39,270 | $32,062 | $35,636 |
| NV | $40,200 | $34,481 | $35,554 |
| WA | $45,300 | $38,579 | $35,536 |
| OK | $37,770 | $31,329 | $35,486 |
| NJ | $46,600 | $38,596 | $35,447 |
| MD | $45,170 | $36,692 | $35,293 |
| MI | $40,460 | $33,221 | $35,272 |
| MO | $38,570 | $32,296 | $35,195 |
| NC | $39,580 | $32,912 | $34,961 |
| IN | $38,730 | $32,187 | $34,916 |
| MA | $46,630 | $37,636 | $34,771 |
| LA | $36,230 | $30,590 | $34,626 |
| VA | $42,780 | $34,855 | $34,595 |
| TN | $36,960 | $31,877 | $34,456 |
| OR | $46,240 | $35,838 | $34,222 |
| NE | $36,800 | $30,778 | $34,055 |
| UT | $39,570 | $32,214 | $33,908 |
| KS | $37,470 | $30,485 | $33,885 |
| MT | $36,220 | $30,337 | $33,617 |
| GA | $39,310 | $32,403 | $33,509 |
| CA | $45,390 | $37,700 | $33,487 |
| NY | $44,210 | $35,912 | $33,368 |
| AZ | $39,740 | $33,520 | $33,154 |
| TX | $37,310 | $32,159 | $33,093 |
| DE | $40,080 | $32,727 | $32,973 |
| FL | $38,730 | $33,300 | $32,188 |
| HI | $41,050 | $33,442 | $30,791 |
| NM | $29,380 | $25,455 | $28,163 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for print binding and finishing workers as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $42,290, 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 print binding and finishing 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 the District of Columbia, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $78,646.
- Levelling out prices for print binding and finishing workers 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 — New Mexico sits at the bottom on $28,163.
- These are distribution medians for print binding and finishing workers, with a national value of $42,290. 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 print binding and finishing 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 $78,646, in the District of Columbia. 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 print binding and finishing workers 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 New Mexico at $28,163. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — New Mexico anchors the bottom at $28,163 — and the two source series are dated independently.