Occupation / job
Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters
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
Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters pays $46,680 where the typical job pays $50,020 — $1.60 an hour apart. That is close enough to average that the interesting numbers on this page are the percentiles, not the median.
Employment stands at 77,170. Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters is common enough to be recruited for continuously and specific enough that the experience travels — the combination that makes changing employer a working pay rise.
Woodworking suits people who want a finished object at the end of the day and can work to a tolerance in a material that moves with the weather.
We carry no verified training length for Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
The middle half runs $38,830 to $55,760 — $1,410 a month between the quarters, a 1.4x ratio. Spreads this narrow are usually set by a grade or a scale, so the negotiation you are imagining probably is not available.
The 25th percentile is $38,830 — $18.66 an hour, and $11,190 below the $50,020 typical American job. Entry-level in this field means that number, not the midpoint, so budget against it.
Avoid it if dust, noise and machine risk are not acceptable to you every day for the whole of a career.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 77,170 figure counts people already working as Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters, 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
The quarters are $38,830 and $55,760, a ratio of 1.4x. In a distribution this narrow, the biggest single lever on your pay in Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters is the cost of living where you do it.
The middle half of this field earns between $38,830 and $55,760. That is $16,930 of range, with $46,680 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Getting to $55,760, the 75th percentile, is worth $9,080 a year more than the $46,680 midpoint and $16,930 more than the $38,830 a quarter of Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters settle for.
The climb from $46,680 to $55,760 is $9,080; the drop to $38,830 is $7,850. A little more room above the midpoint than below it is the normal shape for Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters and for most paid work, and it is the reason the median is the honest summary rather than the average.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $18.66 at the bottom quarter, $22.44 at the midpoint, $26.80 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 Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $46,680 describes them.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $46,680 because we have no verified record of unpaid hours or out-of-pocket costs for this work, and we would rather convert honestly than adjust invented ones.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else