Occupation / job
Patternmakers, Wood
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 $49,630 against $50,020, Patternmakers, Wood sits $0.18 an hour under the typical American job. A gap that small is not a reason to choose it or to rule it out; the spread and the entry cost are where the real decision is.
Only 220 people in the United States are employed as Patternmakers, Wood. At that scale the labour market barely functions as a market: postings are rare, concentrated in a few employers, and often filled by someone already known to them.
Woodworking suits people who want a finished object at the end of the day and can work to a tolerance in a material that moves with the weather.
How long it takes to become one of the 220 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 $41,170 and $59,350 there is $18,180, 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 of $41,170 is only $8,850 off the $50,020 national midpoint. Being in the worst-paid quarter of Patternmakers, Wood still means being paid close to what the average American job pays.
Avoid it if dust, noise and machine risk are not acceptable to you every day for the whole of a career.
There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 220 people employed as Patternmakers, Wood; it did not count the people who trained for it and are doing something else, and a rate built without that denominator would be a number we made up.
What the spread tells you
Top quarter to bottom quarter is 1.4x. In a band that narrow, $49,630 is a genuinely representative number for Patternmakers, Wood and the main variable left is where you live.
In cash terms the middle half of Patternmakers, Wood runs $41,170 to $59,350 — $18,180 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $49,630.
The 75th percentile is $59,350. Reaching it from the $49,630 midpoint is $9,720 a year; reaching it from the $41,170 that the bottom quarter of Patternmakers, Wood earn is $18,180.
$8,460 down to $41,170, $9,720 up to $59,350: the midpoint of Patternmakers, Wood 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.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Patternmakers, Wood is $23.86 an hour. The quarters sit at $19.79 and $28.53, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
This is payroll data: it comes from employers, about people they employ. Anyone doing the work of Patternmakers, Wood for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $49,630 describes them.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Patternmakers, Wood, the hourly figure is $49,630 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