Occupation / job
Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders
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
Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders pays $46,570 where the typical job pays $50,020 — $1.65 an hour apart. That is close enough to average that the interesting numbers on this page are the percentiles, not the median.
44,980 people are employed as Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders. At that scale every large metro has a real market, and the difference between a good year and a bad one is usually which employer you are at rather than whether anyone is hiring.
These roles suit people who want a fixed site, a known task and a shift that ends, and who would rather be reliable than promoted.
We carry no verified training length for Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
Between $39,440 and $53,800 there is $14,360, 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.
A quarter of Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders earn under $39,440, which is $10,580 short of the $50,020 national midpoint. Assume you start there and check whether the arithmetic still works.
Avoid it if you would be unable to move should the plant close, or if repetitive work would grind you down.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 44,980 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
$39,440 to $53,800 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 $39,440 and $53,800. That is $14,360 of range, with $46,570 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Between $39,440 and $53,800 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $46,570. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $7,230; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $14,360.
$46,570 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $7,130 above the bottom quarter, $7,230 below the top one. A symmetric distribution like this is the case where the median genuinely does describe the typical person.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $18.96 at the bottom quarter, $22.38 at the midpoint, $25.86 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
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders. The self-employed are excluded, so $46,570 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, the hourly figure is $46,570 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