Shipping, Receiving, and Inventory Clerks

At $45,260, Shipping, Receiving, and Inventory Clerks lands just under the $50,020 national midpoint — $4,760 apart, inside the range a single promotion or a move between states closes.

816,870 people are employed as Shipping, Receiving, and Inventory Clerks, which puts it among the largest occupations in the United States. At this scale you are never short of a vacancy and never scarce, and the second fact is why the first one is cheap.

These roles suit people who like solving a logistics puzzle that changes every hour, and who can stay calm while several people wait on the answer.

How long it takes to become one of the 816,870 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.

Between $38,200 and $51,570 there is $13,370, 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 is $38,200 — $18.36 an hour, and $11,820 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 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 816,870 people employed as Shipping, Receiving, and Inventory Clerks; 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.

$38,200 to $51,570 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 $38,200 and $51,570. That is $13,370 of range, with $45,260 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.

The 75th percentile is $51,570. Reaching it from the $45,260 midpoint is $6,310 a year; reaching it from the $38,200 that the bottom quarter of Shipping, Receiving, and Inventory Clerks earn is $13,370.

There is $7,060 between $38,200 and $45,260, and $6,310 between $45,260 and $51,570. The lower half of the range is marginally the longer one — worth knowing if you would be entering Shipping, Receiving, and Inventory Clerks at the bottom of it.

Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $18.36 at the bottom quarter, $21.75 at the midpoint, $24.79 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.