Refuse and Recyclable Material Collectors
What the pay figures show
- Illinois pays this job the most on paper: $75,050. Two things happen before that money is yours. State tax takes a share, which puts Washington in front. Then local prices decide what is left, and Illinois wins at $58,730. The best offer and the best deal are not the same place.
- For refuse and recyclable material collectors, Illinois's $75,050 median leads nominally and survives neither adjustment. State income tax differentials alone are sufficient to promote Washington; regional price parity then promotes Illinois, whose $58,730 real figure is the highest purchasing power available in this occupation. Nominal wage comparisons across states are therefore a poor guide to relocation, and the error compounds rather than cancels.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$49,690
People doing it
147,240
Highest paid
$75,050
IL
Best off, really
$58,730
IL, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$33,590
Highest tenth
$75,900
Lowest, really
$30,562
CT
States with data
51
National average
$52,820
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
98.86%
IL, 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 $30,562 to $58,730.
- Roughly 147,240 people hold this job nationally, earning $49,690 in the middle. A solid, ordinary-sized job.
- Every state reports this one. All 51 jurisdictions publish a figure, and the middle wage is $49,690, so the comparison above leaves nobody out.
- Interstate variation in refuse and recyclable material collectors 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 $30,562 to $58,730, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- 147,240 are employed nationally in refuse and recyclable material collectors, placing it well inside the reported range without approaching the highest-headcount occupations.
- All 51 jurisdictions publish an occupational median for refuse and recyclable material collectors, so the spread described above is a complete national range rather than a range across a reported subset.
Pay band: Refuse and Recyclable Material Collectors
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $33,590 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $49,690 |
| Top tenth earn over | $75,900 |
| This salary | $49,690 |
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 Refuse and Recyclable Material Collectors
The national median for this job
$49,690around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $33,590 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $49,690 |
| Top tenth | $75,900 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Refuse and Recyclable Material Collectors, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | South Dakota · $32,950 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Illinois · $75,050 |
| Spread | $42,100 |
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 | $46,330 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $47,677 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| IL | $75,050 | $58,057 | $58,730 |
| WA | $74,620 | $61,325 | $56,489 |
| ND | $59,000 | $49,587 | $55,984 |
| NV | $61,310 | $51,443 | $53,045 |
| IN | $58,900 | $47,798 | $51,851 |
| WI | $59,810 | $48,141 | $51,711 |
| MN | $62,570 | $49,724 | $50,523 |
| UT | $59,310 | $47,196 | $49,679 |
| DE | $61,290 | $48,592 | $48,958 |
| CO | $60,310 | $48,694 | $48,030 |
| NY | $64,950 | $51,457 | $47,811 |
| CA | $64,890 | $52,200 | $46,367 |
| IA | $49,850 | $40,952 | $46,134 |
| OR | $63,210 | $47,989 | $45,825 |
| WY | $48,820 | $41,407 | $45,578 |
| OH | $49,330 | $41,176 | $44,849 |
| RI | $55,970 | $45,473 | $44,840 |
| MT | $49,420 | $40,323 | $44,682 |
| MO | $50,010 | $40,950 | $44,626 |
| NE | $49,390 | $40,321 | $44,615 |
| ID | $49,880 | $40,468 | $44,264 |
| VT | $51,960 | $42,445 | $43,923 |
| MI | $51,030 | $41,265 | $43,813 |
| NM | $47,660 | $39,393 | $43,583 |
| AL | $46,240 | $37,355 | $41,520 |
| HI | $56,270 | $44,560 | $41,028 |
| NJ | $54,630 | $44,605 | $40,966 |
| KS | $45,510 | $36,496 | $40,567 |
| TX | $46,330 | $39,406 | $40,552 |
| PA | $48,240 | $39,460 | $40,472 |
| DC | $55,490 | $44,603 | $40,254 |
| OK | $43,060 | $35,342 | $40,031 |
| TN | $43,270 | $36,947 | $39,937 |
| GA | $46,960 | $38,168 | $39,471 |
| FL | $47,820 | $40,603 | $39,249 |
| KY | $43,100 | $35,420 | $39,152 |
| NC | $44,670 | $36,799 | $39,090 |
| AZ | $46,910 | $39,102 | $38,675 |
| AK | $45,740 | $38,932 | $38,276 |
| NH | $46,580 | $39,607 | $37,597 |
| VA | $46,530 | $37,652 | $37,372 |
| MA | $50,310 | $40,409 | $37,333 |
| LA | $38,810 | $32,586 | $36,885 |
| MS | $39,170 | $32,178 | $36,863 |
| ME | $43,360 | $35,413 | $36,472 |
| AR | $35,640 | $29,957 | $34,629 |
| WV | $35,840 | $30,066 | $33,491 |
| MD | $41,870 | $34,197 | $32,893 |
| SD | $32,950 | $28,655 | $32,528 |
| SC | $34,880 | $29,810 | $31,993 |
| CT | $38,220 | $31,690 | $30,562 |
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 $49,690.
- 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 Washington, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $61,325.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for this job. 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 Connecticut, on $30,562.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for refuse and recyclable material collectors, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $49,690, 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 refuse and recyclable material collectors 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 $61,325, 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 refuse and recyclable material collectors 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; Connecticut anchors the distribution at $30,562. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.