Sawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Wood
What the pay figures show
- Two answers for this job. Best paid: Alaska, at $52,680. Tax does not change that. Best off: Iowa, at $44,616 once local prices count. Tax was not what separated them. Rent was.
- Alaska's $52,680 median for sawing machine setters, operators, and tenders, wood survives the tax adjustment intact, so state income tax is not a differentiator in this occupation's geography. It does not survive price deflation: Iowa takes the top position at $44,616. 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
$42,770
People doing it
40,850
Highest paid
$52,680
AK
Best off, really
$44,616
IA, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$30,890
Highest tenth
$58,170
Lowest, really
$29,420
VA
States with data
46
National average
$43,580
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.77%
IA, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Nationally, this job pays within a fairly narrow band. Adjust for tax and for local prices and the band tightens again, to between $29,420 and $44,616. Geography is not the main lever on pay here.
- This is a small job: about 40,850 people nationally. Fewer workers means each state figure is built on less data.
- This job is not published everywhere — 46 jurisdictions have a figure, with $42,770 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. Alaska tops the ones that are.
- Wages for sawing machine setters, operators, and tenders, wood cluster comparatively tightly across states, and the clustering strengthens after tax and price deflation — a real range of $29,420 to $44,616. Occupation-level factors such as specialisation and employer type therefore explain more of an individual's pay here than location does.
- With 40,850 workers, sawing machine setters, operators, and tenders, wood 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.
- 46 jurisdictions carry a published median for sawing machine setters, operators, and tenders, wood. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Sawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Wood
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $30,890 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $42,770 |
| Top tenth earn over | $58,170 |
| This salary | $42,770 |
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 Sawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Wood
The national median for this job
$42,770around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $30,890 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $42,770 |
| Top tenth | $58,170 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Sawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Wood, state by state
The national median for this job
46states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | New Mexico · $34,720 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Alaska · $52,680 |
| Spread | $17,960 |
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 | $36,740 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $37,808 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| IA | $48,090 | $39,605 | $44,616 |
| MT | $49,090 | $40,073 | $44,405 |
| AK | $52,680 | $44,508 | $43,758 |
| LA | $46,610 | $38,619 | $43,714 |
| ID | $48,350 | $39,320 | $43,008 |
| NE | $46,970 | $38,487 | $42,585 |
| MN | $51,330 | $41,457 | $42,123 |
| OH | $45,010 | $37,824 | $41,197 |
| WA | $51,940 | $43,914 | $40,450 |
| CT | $51,150 | $41,216 | $39,749 |
| WI | $44,440 | $36,550 | $39,260 |
| VT | $46,040 | $37,887 | $39,206 |
| ME | $46,210 | $37,511 | $38,632 |
| IN | $42,620 | $35,197 | $38,182 |
| CO | $47,030 | $38,608 | $38,081 |
| IL | $46,530 | $37,408 | $37,842 |
| WY | $39,470 | $33,894 | $37,309 |
| NH | $46,090 | $39,213 | $37,224 |
| UT | $43,490 | $35,189 | $37,040 |
| MD | $47,060 | $38,121 | $36,667 |
| SD | $37,480 | $32,295 | $36,659 |
| OR | $49,740 | $38,344 | $36,615 |
| TN | $39,070 | $33,573 | $36,289 |
| SC | $39,300 | $33,274 | $35,711 |
| AR | $36,740 | $30,800 | $35,603 |
| AZ | $42,870 | $35,957 | $35,564 |
| MA | $47,210 | $38,073 | $35,175 |
| MI | $40,260 | $33,069 | $35,111 |
| MS | $36,960 | $30,491 | $34,930 |
| NV | $39,350 | $33,798 | $34,850 |
| CA | $47,390 | $39,222 | $34,839 |
| MO | $38,030 | $31,887 | $34,750 |
| PA | $40,590 | $33,548 | $34,408 |
| AL | $37,520 | $30,732 | $34,159 |
| NJ | $44,630 | $37,122 | $34,094 |
| OK | $36,140 | $30,093 | $34,085 |
| GA | $39,860 | $32,817 | $33,938 |
| KY | $36,810 | $30,586 | $33,809 |
| NC | $38,100 | $31,782 | $33,761 |
| KS | $36,930 | $30,081 | $33,436 |
| WV | $35,590 | $29,873 | $33,276 |
| NM | $34,720 | $29,552 | $32,695 |
| TX | $36,740 | $31,701 | $32,622 |
| NY | $42,250 | $34,443 | $32,003 |
| FL | $38,280 | $32,938 | $31,839 |
| VA | $35,790 | $29,640 | $29,420 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for this job, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $42,770 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- 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 Alaska, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $44,508.
- Levelling out prices for this job 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 — Virginia sits at the bottom on $29,420.
- All wage figures for sawing machine setters, operators, and tenders, wood are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $42,770. 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.
- Take-home calculations for sawing machine setters, operators, and tenders, wood 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 $44,508, in Alaska. 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 sawing machine setters, operators, and tenders, wood 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 Virginia at $29,420. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Virginia anchors the bottom at $29,420 — and the two source series are dated independently.