Occupation / job
Bartenders
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 $34,340 against the $50,020 all-occupation figure leaves Bartenders 31% behind — $15,680 across a year. Whether that is workable depends almost entirely on where you would be doing it.
756,390 people are employed as Bartenders, which puts it among the largest occupations in the United States. At this scale you are never short of a vacancy and never scarce, and the second fact is why the first one is cheap.
Serving work suits people who are quick, physically durable and able to be pleasant on demand — and whose income can tolerate depending on how busy a Friday was.
No verified preparation time is on file for Bartenders. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.
Who should not do this
The quarters sit at $27,400 and $47,570 — 1.7x, or $1,680 a month apart. At that width the occupation contains genuinely different jobs, and which one you are being offered matters more than the title does.
The bottom quarter of Bartenders earns under $27,400 — $22,620 below the $50,020 a typical American job pays. Entering at the bottom and waiting is a live risk here, not a theoretical one, and some people never leave that quarter.
Avoid it if you need your income to be independent of how busy a Friday was, or of a stranger’s generosity.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 756,390 figure counts people already working as Bartenders, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
From $27,400 to $47,570 at a ratio of 1.7x is wide enough that two people with the same job title have materially different jobs. $34,340 sits in the middle of that and describes neither of them especially well.
The middle half of this field earns between $27,400 and $47,570. That is $20,170 of range, with $34,340 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Between $27,400 and $47,570 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $34,340. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $13,230; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $20,170.
The upper half of the middle range — $34,340 to $47,570, or $13,230 — is far longer than the lower half at $6,940. In a shape like this an average would flatter Bartenders considerably, and would describe nobody.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $13.17 at the bottom quarter, $16.50 at the midpoint, $22.87 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
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Bartenders. The self-employed are excluded, so $34,340 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Bartenders, the hourly figure is $34,340 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else