Waiters and Waitresses

A median of $35,230 against the $50,020 all-occupation figure leaves Waiters and Waitresses 30% behind — $14,790 across a year. Whether that is workable depends almost entirely on where you would be doing it.

2,270,910 people are employed as Waiters and Waitresses, 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.

Serving work suits people who are quick, physically durable and able to be pleasant on demand — and whose income can tolerate depending on how busy a Friday was.

How long it takes to become one of the 2,270,910 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.

From $27,750 to $47,110 is $1,613 a month, or 1.7x bottom quarter to top. An ordinary spread like this is mostly years and geography; assume you enter near the bottom of it and that closing the gap takes a career rather than a move.

The bottom quarter is under $27,750, $22,270 short of the $50,020 typical American job. The question worth answering before entering Waiters and Waitresses is how long people spend in that quarter, because the median says nothing about it.

Avoid it if you need your income to be independent of how busy a Friday was, or of a stranger’s generosity.

There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 2,270,910 people employed as Waiters and Waitresses; 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.

At 1.7x between $27,750 and $47,110 this is a normally shaped occupation. $35,230 is what the middle of Waiters and Waitresses earns after the years it takes to get there, which is not the same as what it offers you now.

In cash terms the middle half of Waiters and Waitresses runs $27,750 to $47,110 — $19,360 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $35,230.

Getting to $47,110, the 75th percentile, is worth $11,880 a year more than the $35,230 midpoint and $19,360 more than the $27,750 a quarter of Waiters and Waitresses settle for.

The distance from the midpoint up to $47,110 is $11,880 — well over the $7,480 down to $27,750. Distributions leaning this way mean the median understates what the upper half of Waiters and Waitresses earns, and half the field is in that upper half.

On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Waiters and Waitresses is $16.93 an hour. The quarters sit at $13.34 and $22.64, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.