Occupation / job
Cooks, Fast Food
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
The midpoint of $30,890 for Cooks, Fast Food runs $1,594 a month behind the $50,020 typical American job. Over a working life that is not a gap in income, it is a gap in everything income buys later.
641,070 people do this work. An occupation this large has a published, well-known going rate — which means less scope to be underpaid and less scope to negotiate above it.
Cooking suits people who work fast under time pressure in a hot, loud room, and who like that the shift ends when it ends.
No verified preparation time is on file for Cooks, Fast Food. 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 middle half runs $27,260 to $37,260 — $833 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.
A quarter of the field earns below $27,260, which is $13.10 an hour over a full-time year and $22,760 short of the $50,020 national midpoint. Assume that is your starting position and check whether the arithmetic works from there.
Avoid it if you need predictable hours, or a workplace that is not hot, loud and physically punishing.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 641,070 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
Top quarter to bottom quarter is 1.4x. In a band that narrow, $30,890 is a genuinely representative number for Cooks, Fast Food and the main variable left is where you live.
In cash terms the middle half of Cooks, Fast Food runs $27,260 to $37,260 — $10,000 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $30,890.
Between $27,260 and $37,260 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $30,890. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $6,370; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $10,000.
The distance from the midpoint up to $37,260 is $6,370 — well over the $3,630 down to $27,260. Distributions leaning this way mean the median understates what the upper half of Cooks, Fast Food earns, and half the field is in that upper half.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $13.10 at the bottom quarter, $14.85 at the midpoint, $17.91 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
The $30,890 figure is what employers pay employees. It is before tax and before deductions, it excludes the self-employed entirely, and it says nothing about anyone who does this work on their own account.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $30,890 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