Manufacturing Hourly Earnings by State in 2026

Methodology and Source Notes

The core source for this page is the BLS Current Employment Statistics program, accessed through FRED. The hourly earnings series measure average hourly earnings of all employees in manufacturing for each state where FRED publishes the data. The weekly hours series measure average weekly hours of all employees in manufacturing for the same state. Estimated weekly earnings are calculated by multiplying the hourly earnings value by average weekly hours for May 2026.

This is not the same as an occupation wage table. It does not tell you what a machinist, welder, CNC programmer, quality inspector, maintenance technician, or manufacturing engineer earns in each state. Instead, it gives a clean state-level view of manufacturing payroll pressure across all employees in the sector. That makes it useful for site selection, wage benchmarking, labor market planning, recruiting budgets, and pricing conversations with customers who ask why costs moved.

The dataset includes 46 states with available FRED state manufacturing hourly earnings and weekly hours series for May 2026. Four states were excluded because a matching hourly earnings and weekly hours pair was not available in the FRED state manufacturing series at the time this page was updated. National context is included from FRED's all-employee manufacturing hourly earnings series, average weekly hours series, production worker hourly earnings series, and manufacturing employment series.

Manufacturing Hourly Earnings by State

California led the available state series at $44.88 per hour in May 2026, followed by Washington at $43.36. Those two states are not surprising. Both have large advanced manufacturing clusters, high-cost labor markets, and a heavy mix of aerospace, electronics, medical device, food processing, and technology-adjacent production work. Colorado ranked third at $40.25, while Massachusetts ranked fourth at $40.24.

The state average across the available series was $34.83 per hour, while the median state was $34.62. Mississippi had the lowest hourly earnings reading at $28.38, but its one-year wage growth was 8.6%, faster than many higher-pay states. That matters for manufacturers shopping locations. A lower current wage does not always mean a stable labor cost advantage.

A recruiter can use this table to sanity-check pay ranges before launching a hiring push. A contract manufacturer can use it to explain why shop rates moved differently across plants. A manufacturer comparing two states can use it as an early warning signal, then follow up with occupation-level wage data, benefits costs, overtime demand, unemployment levels, and the local supply of experienced production labor.

Estimated Weekly Manufacturing Earnings

Hourly rates only tell part of the story. Weekly hours can move the paycheck and the cost structure. Texas ranked fifth by hourly earnings in this dataset at $39.68, but it ranked near the top for estimated weekly earnings because the average manufacturing workweek was 42.3 hours. California still led the list on estimated weekly earnings at $1,732, with Washington close behind at $1,717.

Weekly earnings are an estimate, not a guarantee of take-home pay. The calculation does not include bonuses, shift differentials, premium overtime rates, commissions, benefits, payroll taxes, or paid time off. It is still a useful rough cut because it combines two pieces of labor market pressure that manufacturers feel every week, pay rates and scheduled hours.

Longer workweeks can be healthy when demand is strong and overtime is voluntary. They can also be a sign that shops are stretched. If weekly hours stay elevated while job openings remain hard to fill, production leaders often face higher burnout risk, more quality misses, and more pressure to automate repetitive work. Pay data should be read together with absenteeism, turnover, staffing levels, and customer delivery performance.

Fastest-Growing Manufacturing Wages

Kansas had the fastest one-year hourly earnings growth in the available state series, with average manufacturing hourly earnings rising 12.1% from May 2025 to May 2026. New Jersey, Idaho, Texas, North Dakota, South Carolina, Mississippi, Illinois, Hawaii, and West Virginia also posted strong gains. These are the states where a buyer looking only at last year's labor assumptions may be underestimating current shop-floor cost pressure.

A fast wage-growth state deserves extra attention even if it does not rank near the top on current hourly pay. Wage acceleration can show up in quotes before it shows up in annual budgets. It can also change whether a job is better kept in-house, outsourced to a supplier, moved to another plant, or redesigned around automation. For sales teams, this is a useful context point when buyers push back on price increases.

What the State Rankings Mean for Manufacturers

High-wage states are often high-specialization states

California, Washington, Massachusetts, Colorado, Texas, Arizona, Minnesota, and New Jersey all appeared in or near the top tier of the hourly earnings rankings. These states have deep pools of advanced manufacturing, aerospace, semiconductor, medical device, electronics, defense, food processing, and industrial technology employers. Higher wages are not just a cost problem. They can also reflect a stronger supply of experienced technicians, engineers, quality leaders, and production managers.

For a manufacturer selling into these regions, the message is simple: buyers may care more about throughput, reliability, documentation, and supplier capacity than the lowest possible hourly rate. If your shop can reduce scrap, shorten lead times, or handle tighter specs, the labor-rate comparison is only one part of the buying decision.

Lower-wage states can still have rising cost pressure

Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, South Dakota, Kentucky, North Carolina, Idaho, Iowa, and Georgia sat near the lower end of the hourly earnings table. That does not mean those markets are easy. Mississippi, Idaho, and West Virginia all showed notable one-year hourly earnings growth. When a lower-wage state grows quickly, manufacturers may feel the pinch because historical price assumptions, customer contracts, and recruiting budgets were built on older numbers.

If you're choosing a plant location, the lower current wage is only one input. You still need to check labor availability, technical college output, transportation costs, electricity rates, property taxes, permitting timelines, supplier density, and the local concentration of competitors hiring from the same talent pool.

Weekly hours can flag capacity strain

States with high weekly hours may be working through strong order books, but they may also be covering labor shortages with longer schedules. That can work for a while. It gets risky when overtime becomes the default staffing model. Longer schedules can raise labor cost per unit, increase fatigue, and make retention harder if competing plants offer similar pay with better schedule stability.

For marketing and sales teams, this data can sharpen account targeting. A plant in a high-wage, high-hours market may be more receptive to equipment, outsourcing, staffing, process improvement, quality, maintenance, or automation offers that reduce labor bottlenecks. A plant in a lower-wage but fast-growth market may need a different message, one focused on protecting margins before wage inflation eats the quote.

National Manufacturing Pay Context

National FRED data shows average hourly earnings of all manufacturing employees at $36.71 in May 2026, up from $35.31 in May 2025. National average weekly hours for all manufacturing employees reached 40.4 hours in May 2026, compared with 40.1 hours one year earlier. Production and nonsupervisory manufacturing workers earned $30.19 per hour in May 2026, while total manufacturing employment was 12.605 million jobs.

That national baseline helps separate two different questions. The first question is whether manufacturing wages are rising in general. They are. The second question is whether your local plant, supplier, or customer market is rising faster or slower than the national number. State-level hourly earnings answer that second question better than a national average.

How to Use This Data

For owners and general managers, the table is a quick way to benchmark whether your state is above or below peers. For sales teams, it helps explain why prospects in different regions react differently to pricing. For marketers, it can shape local campaigns around pain points that are real. A high-wage state may respond to automation, throughput, or recruiting support. A fast-growth state may respond to margin protection, supplier diversification, or process redesign.

The best use is not to treat any single number as the answer. Pair this report with occupation-level BLS wage data, local unemployment rates, job posting volume, industrial electricity costs, freight access, customer density, and supplier availability. The pay table tells you where labor pressure exists. It does not tell you whether the market has the skills you need, whether the plant can hire second-shift supervisors, or whether local schools are producing enough maintenance technicians.

For linkers, researchers, and journalists, the tables are designed to be cited. Every figure links back to the original FRED series. FRED lists BLS as the source and provides the official series metadata, frequency, seasonal adjustment status, and release history.

Cite This

Sources

This page uses BLS Current Employment Statistics data distributed by FRED. State-level table links point to the exact FRED hourly earnings and weekly hours series used in the calculations.