Occupation / job
Fast Food and Counter Workers
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
Fast Food and Counter Workers pays $31,200 against $50,020 for the typical American job — $18,820 a year, or $9.04 an hour, of difference. A gap that size has to be worth something to you that is not money, and it has to keep being worth it.
3,854,050 people are employed as Fast Food and Counter Workers, 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.
Serving work suits people who are quick, physically durable and able to be pleasant on demand — and whose income can tolerate depending on how busy a Friday was.
How long it takes to become one of the 3,854,050 people doing this is not something we have a source for. BLS counts and pays them; it does not record how they got there, and we would rather say so than guess.
Who should not do this
A quarter of Fast Food and Counter Workers earn under $27,700 and a quarter over $36,070: 1.3x, and $8,370 between the ends. That is a narrow band — enough room to be paid better than average, not enough for the occupation to be a route to a materially different income.
The bottom quarter is under $27,700, $22,320 short of the $50,020 typical American job. The question worth answering before entering Fast Food and Counter Workers is how long people spend in that quarter, because the median says nothing about it.
Avoid it if you need your income to be independent of how busy a Friday was, or of a stranger’s generosity.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 3,854,050 figure counts people already working as Fast Food and Counter Workers, 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
A 1.3x ratio from $27,700 to $36,070 makes $31,200 a dependable planning number. Dependable is the whole offer here — there is not much room above it.
Put in money rather than ratios: $27,700 at the 25th percentile, $31,200 at the midpoint, $36,070 at the 75th. $8,370 separates the quarter of Fast Food and Counter Workers at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Between $27,700 and $36,070 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $31,200. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $4,870; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $8,370.
The climb from $31,200 to $36,070 is $4,870, against $3,500 down to $27,700. Rather more of the range sits above the midpoint than below it, so the realistic upside in Fast Food and Counter Workers is larger than the realistic downside.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $13.31 at the bottom quarter, $15.00 at the midpoint, $17.34 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 Fast Food and Counter Workers. The self-employed are excluded, so $31,200 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
The hourly number on this page is $31,200 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Fast Food and Counter Workers, 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