Cooks, Short Order

Cooks, Short Order pays $35,880 where the typical American job pays $50,020 — $14,140 a year short, or $6.79 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.

138,650 people are employed as Cooks, Short Order. At that size there is a real ladder and enough churn that experience can be sold to a competitor rather than only accumulated where you are.

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, Short Order — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.

Between $30,610 and $42,450 there is $11,840, 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 is under $30,610, $19,410 short of the $50,020 typical American job. The question worth answering before entering Cooks, Short Order 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.

There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 138,650 people employed as Cooks, Short Order; 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.

$30,610 to $42,450 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, Short Order runs $30,610 to $42,450 — $11,840 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $35,880.

Between $30,610 and $42,450 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $35,880. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $6,570; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $11,840.

From $35,880 it is $5,270 down to the bottom quarter and $6,570 up to the top. The upper half of the range is the longer one, which is the ordinary shape for work where experience compounds.

Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $17.25 at the midpoint for Cooks, Short Order, $14.71 at the 25th percentile and $20.40 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.