Occupation / job
Metal-Refining Furnace 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
Metal-Refining Furnace Operators and Tenders pays $54,430 against $50,020 across all occupations, which is $367 a month ahead. A modest premium, and modest premiums are usually attached to modest requirements — check what this one is attached to.
16,780 people work as Metal-Refining Furnace Operators and Tenders. That is enough for a functioning national market and not enough for a functioning local one — in most metros this is a few employers rather than a field you can move around inside.
These roles suit people who want a trade where the work is measurable to the thousandth and nobody can argue with the gauge.
We carry no verified training length for Metal-Refining Furnace Operators and Tenders — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
A quarter of Metal-Refining Furnace Operators and Tenders earn under $46,080 and a quarter over $62,810 — 1.4x, or $16,730 apart. Narrow spreads usually mean a pay schedule, which is stability bought at the price of upside.
At $46,080, or $22.15 an hour, the bottom quarter of this work lands within $3,940 of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — an unusually solid floor.
Avoid it if the noise, the fume exposure and the standing are not acceptable long-run terms.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 16,780 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
$46,080 to $62,810 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 $46,080 and $62,810. That is $16,730 of range, with $54,430 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Getting to $62,810, the 75th percentile, is worth $8,380 a year more than the $54,430 midpoint and $16,730 more than the $46,080 a quarter of Metal-Refining Furnace Operators and Tenders settle for.
$54,430 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $8,350 above the bottom quarter, $8,380 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: $22.15 at the bottom quarter, $26.16 at the midpoint, $30.19 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 Metal-Refining Furnace Operators and Tenders. The self-employed are excluded, so $54,430 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Metal-Refining Furnace Operators and Tenders, the hourly figure is $54,430 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