Occupation / job
Cooks, Private Household
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 $47,940 against $50,020, Cooks, Private Household sits $1.00 an hour under the typical American job. A gap that small is not a reason to choose it or to rule it out; the spread and the entry cost are where the real decision is.
There are 1,100 of these posts in the country. Plan on the assumption that the job will not appear where you already live, because on those numbers it usually will not.
Cooking suits people who work fast under time pressure in a hot, loud room, and who like that the shift ends when it ends.
We carry no verified training length for Cooks, Private Household — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
Between $40,630 and $55,450 there is $14,820, 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 25th percentile of $40,630 is only $9,390 off the $50,020 national midpoint. Being in the worst-paid quarter of Cooks, Private Household still means being paid close to what the average American job pays.
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. 1,100 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
$40,630 to $55,450 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 Cooks, Private Household runs $40,630 to $55,450 — $14,820 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $47,940.
Between $40,630 and $55,450 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $47,940. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $7,510; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $14,820.
$7,310 down to $40,630, $7,510 up to $55,450: the midpoint of Cooks, Private Household is centred in its own middle half. That symmetry is why the median and the average would say much the same thing here, which is not true of most pages on this site.
Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $23.04 at the midpoint for Cooks, Private Household, $19.53 at the 25th percentile and $26.65 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.
What these figures are, and what they are not
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Cooks, Private Household. The self-employed are excluded, so $47,940 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
The hourly number on this page is $47,940 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Cooks, Private Household, 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