Separating, Filtering, Clarifying, Precipitating, and Still Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders
What the pay figures show
- Wyoming pays this job the most, at $108,900. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $94,048 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- Wyoming leads for separating, filtering, clarifying, precipitating, and still machine setters, operators, and tenders at $108,900 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $94,048 in price-deflated terms. That robustness is the minority case: across the largest occupations, state income tax reorders the leader roughly a third of the time and price level does so more often still. Where the nominal leader survives both, the wage premium is large enough to absorb the state's own tax and price levels.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$51,610
People doing it
60,100
Highest paid
$108,900
WY
Best off, really
$94,048
WY, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$36,200
Highest tenth
$79,750
Lowest, really
$33,517
WV
States with data
50
National average
$56,030
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
90.85%
WY, 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 $33,517 up to $94,048.
- Only 60,100 people do this job in the whole country. It is a small field, so the pay figures rest on fewer reports.
- Some states are missing here. There are figures for 50 jurisdictions, averaging $51,610 in the middle. A blank means nobody published a number, not that the job pays nothing there. Wyoming leads the published set.
- The nominal spread for separating, filtering, clarifying, precipitating, and still machine setters, operators, and tenders approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $33,517 to $94,048, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- National employment in separating, filtering, clarifying, precipitating, and still machine setters, operators, and tenders is 60,100. ⚠️ 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.
- Coverage for separating, filtering, clarifying, precipitating, and still machine setters, operators, and tenders runs to 50 jurisdictions, short of the full set. The omitted states are suppressed at source; treat the spread above as the range across reported states rather than across the country.
Pay band: Separating, Filtering, Clarifying, Precipitating, and Still Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $36,200 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $51,610 |
| Top tenth earn over | $79,750 |
| This salary | $51,610 |
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 Separating, Filtering, Clarifying, Precipitating, and Still Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders
The national median for this job
$51,610around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $36,200 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $51,610 |
| Top tenth | $79,750 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Separating, Filtering, Clarifying, Precipitating, and Still Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, state by state
The national median for this job
50states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | West Virginia · $35,870 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Wyoming · $108,900 |
| Spread | $73,030 |
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 | $46,910 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $48,274 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| WY | $108,900 | $85,441 | $94,048 |
| ND | $59,390 | $49,900 | $56,338 |
| NV | $62,960 | $52,768 | $54,412 |
| LA | $58,640 | $47,924 | $54,247 |
| KY | $58,770 | $47,462 | $52,463 |
| WI | $60,100 | $48,357 | $51,943 |
| SD | $50,780 | $42,982 | $48,790 |
| IA | $52,220 | $42,766 | $48,178 |
| NH | $60,340 | $50,663 | $48,093 |
| IN | $53,990 | $43,998 | $47,728 |
| AZ | $57,820 | $47,595 | $47,075 |
| VA | $59,480 | $47,313 | $46,961 |
| ME | $57,190 | $45,592 | $46,955 |
| MN | $57,190 | $45,767 | $46,503 |
| TN | $50,470 | $42,733 | $46,190 |
| ID | $52,160 | $42,179 | $46,135 |
| GA | $55,500 | $44,604 | $46,126 |
| OK | $49,440 | $40,181 | $45,512 |
| VT | $53,570 | $43,685 | $45,206 |
| MO | $49,290 | $40,405 | $44,033 |
| SC | $49,320 | $40,854 | $43,846 |
| WA | $56,160 | $47,305 | $43,574 |
| MT | $47,920 | $39,188 | $43,425 |
| OH | $47,640 | $39,865 | $43,420 |
| NJ | $58,140 | $47,231 | $43,378 |
| KS | $48,790 | $38,949 | $43,293 |
| MD | $55,580 | $44,562 | $42,863 |
| NC | $49,140 | $40,212 | $42,716 |
| NE | $47,080 | $38,570 | $42,677 |
| MI | $49,480 | $40,085 | $42,560 |
| AL | $46,970 | $37,910 | $42,136 |
| NY | $55,990 | $44,742 | $41,571 |
| TX | $46,910 | $39,872 | $41,031 |
| MS | $43,890 | $35,782 | $40,991 |
| FL | $49,610 | $42,042 | $40,639 |
| PA | $48,390 | $39,576 | $40,591 |
| AK | $48,000 | $40,748 | $40,061 |
| AR | $41,720 | $34,617 | $40,016 |
| CO | $49,590 | $40,552 | $39,999 |
| UT | $46,600 | $37,549 | $39,525 |
| IL | $48,440 | $38,849 | $39,299 |
| CT | $50,370 | $40,632 | $39,186 |
| DE | $47,520 | $38,292 | $38,580 |
| CA | $52,910 | $43,326 | $38,484 |
| NM | $41,370 | $34,609 | $38,290 |
| RI | $46,710 | $38,380 | $37,845 |
| HI | $51,070 | $40,771 | $37,540 |
| OR | $50,160 | $38,645 | $36,903 |
| MA | $48,970 | $39,399 | $36,400 |
| WV | $35,870 | $30,089 | $33,517 |
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 $51,610 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 Wyoming, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $85,441.
- The price adjustment for this job 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 — West Virginia anchors the bottom at $33,517. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- All wage figures for separating, filtering, clarifying, precipitating, and still machine setters, operators, and tenders are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $51,610. 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 separating, filtering, clarifying, precipitating, and still machine setters, operators, and tenders 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 $85,441, in Wyoming. 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 figures for separating, filtering, clarifying, precipitating, and still machine setters, operators, and tenders 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.