Occupation / job
Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria
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
At a $37,450 midpoint, Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria sits 25% under the $50,020 national figure. The shortfall is $1,047 a month, which is roughly the size of a rent difference between metros — worth checking before the job is the thing you blame.
441,050 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, Institution and Cafeteria. 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
Between $32,440 and $44,800 there is $12,360, 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.
The bottom quarter of Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria earns under $32,440 — $17,580 below the $50,020 national midpoint, or $15.59 an hour. A floor that low means the occupation cannot be judged on its median alone; a quarter of the people in it are somewhere else entirely.
Avoid it if you need predictable hours, or a workplace that is not hot, loud and physically punishing.
There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 441,050 people employed as Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria; it did not count the people who trained for it and are doing something else, and a rate built without that denominator would be a number we made up.
What the spread tells you
$32,440 to $44,800 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.
The middle half of this field earns between $32,440 and $44,800. That is $12,360 of range, with $37,450 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
The 75th percentile is $44,800. Reaching it from the $37,450 midpoint is $7,350 a year; reaching it from the $32,440 that the bottom quarter of Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria earn is $12,360.
$7,350 separates $37,450 from the $44,800 top quarter, while only $5,010 separates it from $32,440. The range leans upward, which means the middle of Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria has more room above it than a symmetric reading of the median would suggest.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria is $18.00 an hour. The quarters sit at $15.59 and $21.53, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $37,450 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.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Cooks, Institution and Cafeteria, the hourly figure is $37,450 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