Water and Wastewater Treatment Plant and System Operators
What the pay figures show
- California pays this job the most, at $81,770. Unusually, it stays on top. Tax does not overturn it. Nor do local prices — it is still first at $68,182 once levelled out. That is rarer than it sounds. For most jobs the leader changes.
- California leads for water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators at $81,770 and retains the position through both adjustments, finishing first at $68,182 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
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
$60,020
People doing it
128,490
Highest paid
$81,770
CA
Best off, really
$68,182
NV, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$39,110
Highest tenth
$91,060
Lowest, really
$41,006
GA
States with data
50
National average
$62,540
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
96.98%
NV, 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 $41,006 and $68,182. Geography is not the main lever on pay here.
- 128,490 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $60,020. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- This job is not published everywhere — 50 jurisdictions have a figure, with $60,020 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. California tops the ones that are.
- Wages for water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators cluster comparatively tightly across states, and the clustering strengthens after tax and price deflation — a real range of $41,006 to $68,182. Occupation-level factors such as specialisation and employer type therefore explain more of an individual's pay here than location does.
- National employment in water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators is 128,490 — a substantial occupation, though an order of magnitude below the largest. Regional differentials here move real aggregate sums without dominating any single state's wage bill.
- 50 jurisdictions carry a published median for water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Water and Wastewater Treatment Plant and System Operators
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $39,110 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $60,020 |
| Top tenth earn over | $91,060 |
| This salary | $60,020 |
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 Water and Wastewater Treatment Plant and System Operators
The national median for this job
$60,020around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $39,110 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $60,020 |
| Top tenth | $91,060 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Water and Wastewater Treatment Plant and System Operators, state by state
The national median for this job
50states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $44,320 |
|---|---|
| Highest | California · $81,770 |
| Spread | $37,450 |
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 | $49,460 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $50,898 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| NV | $81,440 | $66,123 | $68,182 |
| WA | $80,800 | $65,673 | $60,493 |
| MN | $74,670 | $57,806 | $58,736 |
| CT | $78,820 | $60,695 | $58,535 |
| WY | $63,260 | $53,009 | $58,350 |
| CO | $74,200 | $58,473 | $57,676 |
| ND | $60,470 | $50,768 | $57,318 |
| NJ | $78,760 | $61,411 | $56,401 |
| CA | $81,770 | $62,843 | $55,820 |
| IA | $60,990 | $49,480 | $55,741 |
| WI | $63,550 | $50,924 | $54,700 |
| NE | $61,220 | $49,288 | $54,537 |
| IL | $67,810 | $53,323 | $53,940 |
| OH | $59,170 | $48,812 | $53,165 |
| VT | $63,640 | $51,225 | $53,009 |
| PA | $63,310 | $51,106 | $52,416 |
| MT | $58,040 | $46,844 | $51,908 |
| DE | $64,940 | $51,304 | $51,690 |
| UT | $61,290 | $48,699 | $51,261 |
| SD | $53,370 | $45,063 | $51,152 |
| ME | $61,870 | $49,036 | $50,502 |
| MI | $59,270 | $47,535 | $50,471 |
| NH | $62,940 | $52,752 | $50,076 |
| OR | $69,720 | $52,328 | $49,969 |
| MA | $68,550 | $53,947 | $49,841 |
| AZ | $61,340 | $50,336 | $49,786 |
| AK | $60,160 | $50,519 | $49,667 |
| RI | $61,820 | $49,954 | $49,259 |
| FL | $59,030 | $49,611 | $47,955 |
| MD | $61,870 | $49,317 | $47,436 |
| IN | $53,540 | $43,649 | $47,350 |
| HI | $65,560 | $51,318 | $47,250 |
| NY | $63,990 | $50,738 | $47,142 |
| VA | $59,420 | $47,268 | $46,917 |
| TN | $50,670 | $42,893 | $46,364 |
| AL | $51,870 | $41,631 | $46,272 |
| ID | $52,210 | $42,217 | $46,177 |
| SC | $52,090 | $42,897 | $46,038 |
| NC | $51,680 | $42,152 | $44,776 |
| MO | $49,940 | $40,897 | $44,568 |
| NM | $48,190 | $39,796 | $44,029 |
| WV | $47,560 | $39,053 | $43,503 |
| LA | $46,210 | $38,310 | $43,364 |
| MS | $46,480 | $37,759 | $43,257 |
| TX | $49,460 | $41,921 | $43,140 |
| OK | $45,890 | $37,488 | $42,462 |
| AR | $44,320 | $36,610 | $42,320 |
| KS | $46,780 | $37,446 | $41,623 |
| KY | $45,430 | $37,211 | $41,131 |
| GA | $48,930 | $39,652 | $41,006 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for this job as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $60,020, 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 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 Nevada, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $66,123.
- 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 — Georgia anchors the bottom at $41,006. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- These are distribution medians for water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators, with a national value of $60,020. 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 water and wastewater treatment plant and system 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 $66,123, in Nevada. 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 water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators 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.