Occupation / job
Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators
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
A $58,470 midpoint puts Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators $8,450 above the $50,020 typical American job — a 17% premium paid for the training, the licence or the conditions. It is not free money and it disappears the moment you stop meeting the requirement.
With 105,200 in the occupation, Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators is a big field with a visible internal market. Big fields reward moving: the pay you can negotiate on arrival usually beats what the annual review will give you for staying.
Scheduling, dispatch and material recording suit people who can hold a moving picture of where everything is and re-plan it the moment one piece slips.
No verified preparation time is on file for Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.
Who should not do this
$48,880 to $75,030 — 1.5x, or $2,179 a month between the quarters. An unremarkable spread, which means the useful planning number for Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators is the bottom of it rather than the middle.
At $48,880, or $23.50 an hour, the bottom quarter of this work lands within $1,140 of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — an unusually solid floor.
Avoid it if you need to finish a task before starting the next; that is not how this desk works.
There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 105,200 people employed as Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators; 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
A 1.5x ratio is the most common shape in this data: some room to move, none of it quick. Read $58,470 as where you might be after years in Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators, and $48,880 as where you would start.
Put in money rather than ratios: $48,880 at the 25th percentile, $58,470 at the midpoint, $75,030 at the 75th. $26,150 separates the quarter of Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Between $48,880 and $75,030 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $58,470. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $16,560; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $26,150.
The distance from the midpoint up to $75,030 is $16,560 — well over the $9,590 down to $48,880. Distributions leaning this way mean the median understates what the upper half of Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators earns, and half the field is in that upper half.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $23.50 at the bottom quarter, $28.11 at the midpoint, $36.07 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
This is payroll data: it comes from employers, about people they employ. Anyone doing the work of Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $58,470 describes them.
The hourly number on this page is $58,470 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators, so it is arithmetic rather than an effective rate.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else