Occupation / job
Cooks, Restaurant
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
Cooks, Restaurant pays $37,390 where the typical American job pays $50,020 — $12,630 a year short, or $6.07 an hour. That is a liveable wage in a cheap state and a difficult one in an expensive city, and nothing about the national figure tells you which you would be in.
1,409,890 people are employed as Cooks, Restaurant, 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.
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, Restaurant — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
$10,610 separates the bottom quarter at $34,010 from the top quarter at $44,620, a ratio of 1.3x. In a band that tight, moving up inside Cooks, Restaurant pays less than moving out of it would.
The bottom quarter is under $34,010, $16,010 short of the $50,020 typical American job. The question worth answering before entering Cooks, Restaurant is how long people spend in that quarter, because the median says nothing about it.
Avoid it if you need predictable hours, or a workplace that is not hot, loud and physically punishing.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 1,409,890 figure counts people already working as Cooks, Restaurant, 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
At 1.3x between $34,010 and $44,620, this is a narrow distribution. $37,390 is a reliable number to plan around, which is worth something — but so is knowing that outperforming the field will not be paid for.
Put in money rather than ratios: $34,010 at the 25th percentile, $37,390 at the midpoint, $44,620 at the 75th. $10,610 separates the quarter of Cooks, Restaurant at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Getting to $44,620, the 75th percentile, is worth $7,230 a year more than the $37,390 midpoint and $10,610 more than the $34,010 a quarter of Cooks, Restaurant settle for.
From $37,390 the drop to $34,010 is $3,380 and the climb to $44,620 is $7,230. When the upper half of the range is that much longer, the average is pulled well above the median — which is exactly why this site publishes the median.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Cooks, Restaurant is $17.97 an hour. The quarters sit at $16.35 and $21.45, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $37,390 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, Restaurant, the hourly figure is $37,390 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