Occupation / job
Print Binding and Finishing Workers
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
Print Binding and Finishing Workers pays a median $42,290 against $50,020 across all occupations — $3.71 an hour of difference. At that distance the deciding variable is where you do it, not how long you have done it.
At 33,180 employed, this is a mid-sized occupation. In a normal city that means several possible employers and a genuine market rate, which is the point at which knowing the numbers on this page starts to be worth money.
Printing work suits people who are exacting about colour, registration and stock, in a trade where a whole run can be wrong for a reason nobody sees until it is off the press.
How long it takes to become one of the 33,180 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
A quarter of Print Binding and Finishing Workers earn under $36,910 and a quarter over $49,130: 1.3x, and $12,220 between the ends. That is a narrow band — enough room to be paid better than average, not enough for the occupation to be a route to a materially different income.
The 25th percentile is $36,910 — $17.74 an hour, and $13,110 below the $50,020 typical American job. Entry-level in this field means that number, not the midpoint, so budget against it.
Avoid it if you want a growing field; print volume has been contracting for a long time and the plants consolidate.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 33,180 figure counts people already working as Print Binding and Finishing Workers, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
At 1.3x between $36,910 and $49,130, this is a narrow distribution. $42,290 is a reliable number to plan around, which is worth something — but so is knowing that outperforming the field will not be paid for.
The middle half of this field earns between $36,910 and $49,130. That is $12,220 of range, with $42,290 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
The 75th percentile is $49,130. Reaching it from the $42,290 midpoint is $6,840 a year; reaching it from the $36,910 that the bottom quarter of Print Binding and Finishing Workers earn is $12,220.
From $42,290 it is $5,380 down to the bottom quarter and $6,840 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: $17.74 at the bottom quarter, $20.33 at the midpoint, $23.62 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 Print Binding and Finishing Workers. The self-employed are excluded, so $42,290 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $42,290 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