Personal Care and Service Workers, All Other

Personal Care and Service Workers, All Other pays a median $41,600 against $50,020 across all occupations — $4.04 an hour of difference. At that distance the deciding variable is where you do it, not how long you have done it.

Employment stands at 60,420. Personal Care and Service Workers, All Other 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 personal care roles suit people who are good with strangers quickly and repeatedly, since the same interpersonal skill has to be produced fresh for every client all day.

How long it takes to become one of the 60,420 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.

$8,530 separates the bottom quarter at $34,180 from the top quarter at $42,710, a ratio of 1.2x. In a band that tight, moving up inside Personal Care and Service Workers, All Other pays less than moving out of it would.

The bottom quarter is under $34,180, $15,840 short of the $50,020 typical American job. The question worth answering before entering Personal Care and Service Workers, All Other is how long people spend in that quarter, because the median says nothing about it.

Avoid it if you need a schedule that does not follow other people’s evenings, weekends and school terms.

There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 60,420 people employed as Personal Care and Service Workers, All Other; 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.

A 1.2x spread means the top quarter of Personal Care and Service Workers, All Other is not doing a different job from the bottom quarter, just a slightly better-paid version of the same one. Between $34,180 and $42,710 is the whole of the negotiation.

In cash terms the middle half of Personal Care and Service Workers, All Other runs $34,180 to $42,710 — $8,530 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $41,600.

The 75th percentile is $42,710. Reaching it from the $41,600 midpoint is $1,110 a year; reaching it from the $34,180 that the bottom quarter of Personal Care and Service Workers, All Other earn is $8,530.

Getting from $34,180 to the $41,600 midpoint is $7,420; getting from there to $42,710 is only $1,110. The hard part of the range is the lower half, which is also the half a newcomer starts in.

Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $16.43 at the bottom quarter, $20.00 at the midpoint, $20.53 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.