Occupation / job
Bakers
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
A median of $37,160 against the $50,020 all-occupation figure leaves Bakers 26% behind — $12,860 across a year. Whether that is workable depends almost entirely on where you would be doing it.
With 236,200 in the occupation, Bakers is a big field with a visible internal market. Big fields reward moving: the pay you can negotiate on arrival usually beats what the annual review will give you for staying.
This work suits people who can hold a standard on a moving line and treat the hygiene rules as the job rather than as an interruption to it.
How long it takes to become one of the 236,200 people doing this is not something we have a source for. BLS counts and pays them; it does not record how they got there, and we would rather say so than guess.
Who should not do this
Between $32,660 and $44,360 there is $11,700, a ratio of 1.4x. Tight distributions are predictable, and predictable cuts both ways: little risk of being badly underpaid, little prospect of doing much better.
Under $32,660 is where a quarter of this field sits, $17,360 beneath the $50,020 a typical American job pays. The risk in Bakers is not the average outcome, it is how long you might spend in the bottom quarter before leaving it.
Avoid it if cold, wet or fast-line conditions would be physically unsustainable for you over years.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 236,200 is a headcount of the employed, which is a numerator without a denominator — everyone who qualified and never got hired is missing from it, and we will not estimate them to complete a percentage.
What the spread tells you
$32,660 to $44,360 is a 1.4x range. Ranges this tight usually mean the employer set is homogeneous — the same kind of organisation paying the same kind of scale — so the lever you have is geography rather than employer.
In cash terms the middle half of Bakers runs $32,660 to $44,360 — $11,700 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $37,160.
The 75th percentile is $44,360. Reaching it from the $37,160 midpoint is $7,200 a year; reaching it from the $32,660 that the bottom quarter of Bakers earn is $11,700.
The distance from the midpoint up to $44,360 is $7,200 — well over the $4,500 down to $32,660. Distributions leaning this way mean the median understates what the upper half of Bakers earns, and half the field is in that upper half.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $15.70 at the bottom quarter, $17.86 at the midpoint, $21.32 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
This is payroll data: it comes from employers, about people they employ. Anyone doing the work of Bakers for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $37,160 describes them.
The hourly number on this page is $37,160 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Bakers, so it is arithmetic rather than an effective rate.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else