Occupation / job
Maintenance Workers, Machinery
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
Maintenance Workers, Machinery pays $60,850 against $50,020 across all occupations — $902 a month more. Every premium is paid for something: find out whether it is the schooling, the licence, the hours or the risk before you decide you want it.
Employment stands at 60,020. Maintenance Workers, Machinery is common enough to be recruited for continuously and specific enough that the experience travels — the combination that makes changing employer a working pay rise.
These roles suit people who want to be the one who keeps things running, in work where competence is obvious to everyone around you within about a week.
We carry no verified training length for Maintenance Workers, Machinery — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
From $48,920 to $75,200 is $2,190 a month, or 1.5x bottom quarter to top. An ordinary spread like this is mostly years and geography; assume you enter near the bottom of it and that closing the gap takes a career rather than a move.
The bottom quarter of Maintenance Workers, Machinery earns under $48,920, which is within $1,100 of the $50,020 typical American job. An occupation whose 25th percentile is level with the national middle has an unusually forgiving downside.
Avoid it if you need to be off duty; this is a category of work that gets called at inconvenient hours by definition.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 60,020 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
1.5x between $48,920 and $75,200 is the ordinary shape of an occupation where experience and region both matter and neither dominates. $60,850 is a fair expectation by mid-career, not on day one.
In cash terms the middle half of Maintenance Workers, Machinery runs $48,920 to $75,200 — $26,280 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $60,850.
Between $48,920 and $75,200 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $60,850. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $14,350; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $26,280.
From $60,850 it is $11,930 down to the bottom quarter and $14,350 up to the top. The upper half of the range is the longer one, which is the ordinary shape for work where experience compounds.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $23.51 at the bottom quarter, $29.25 at the midpoint, $36.15 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
The $60,850 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.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $60,850 because we have no verified record of unpaid hours or out-of-pocket costs for this work, and we would rather convert honestly than adjust invented ones.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else