Occupation / job
Grinding, Lapping, Polishing, and Buffing Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic
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 $46,550, Grinding, Lapping, Polishing, and Buffing Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic lands just under the $50,020 national midpoint — $3,470 apart, inside the range a single promotion or a move between states closes.
67,000 people are employed as Grinding, Lapping, Polishing, and Buffing Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic. 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.
This work suits people who like setting a machine up properly and then producing consistently, which is a different skill from making one good part.
How long it takes to become one of the 67,000 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
Between $39,390 and $54,290 there is $14,900, 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 is $39,390 — $18.93 an hour, and $10,630 below the $50,020 typical American job. Entry-level in this field means that number, not the midpoint, so budget against it.
Avoid it if the noise, the fume exposure and the standing are not acceptable long-run terms.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 67,000 figure counts people already working as Grinding, Lapping, Polishing, and Buffing Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic, 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
$39,390 to $54,290 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 Grinding, Lapping, Polishing, and Buffing Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic runs $39,390 to $54,290 — $14,900 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $46,550.
The 75th percentile is $54,290. Reaching it from the $46,550 midpoint is $7,740 a year; reaching it from the $39,390 that the bottom quarter of Grinding, Lapping, Polishing, and Buffing Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic earn is $14,900.
$7,160 down to $39,390, $7,740 up to $54,290: the midpoint of Grinding, Lapping, Polishing, and Buffing Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic 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.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $18.93 at the bottom quarter, $22.37 at the midpoint, $26.10 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 Grinding, Lapping, Polishing, and Buffing Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic. The self-employed are excluded, so $46,550 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Grinding, Lapping, Polishing, and Buffing Machine Tool Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic, the hourly figure is $46,550 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