Manufacturing Wage Premium by State: 2026 BLS Data Report

What the Manufacturing Wage Premium Measures

The manufacturing wage premium is the gap between manufacturing average annual pay and all private-sector average annual pay in the same state. It is not a job posting salary. It is an establishment-level payroll measure from unemployment insurance records. That makes it useful for comparing how manufacturing compensation stacks up against the broader private labor market in each state.

The National Association of Manufacturers reported 12.6 million manufacturing employees, more than 239,000 manufacturers, $106,691 in average annual earnings, and $2.96 trillion in value added in Q4 2025. Those national numbers are useful, but they don't show where manufacturing pay has the greatest local edge. This page fills that gap with state-level QCEW data.

The Federal Reserve's G.17 release showed manufacturing output at 97.9 in May 2026, up 1.4% year over year. Output can rise without equal wage gains in every state, so payroll data matters for workforce planning, recruiting budgets, and sales territory planning.

Manufacturing Wage Premium by State Table

States are ranked by manufacturing wage premium. Each state link opens the BLS QCEW area file used for the calculation. Manufacturing is NAICS 31-33 under private ownership. All private-sector pay uses the QCEW total private industry row.

States With the Largest Manufacturing Wage Premium

High-premium states often have a mix of advanced manufacturing, energy-related production, aerospace, chemicals, defense, medical devices, or specialized machinery. They can also have broader private labor markets where retail, hospitality, and service work pull the all-private average down.

States With the Smallest Manufacturing Wage Premium

A low or negative premium doesn't mean manufacturing jobs are bad. It usually means the state's broader private economy pays well, the manufacturing mix is less capital intensive, or the state has a high share of headquarters, finance, software, and professional services jobs outside manufacturing.

How to Use This Data

Manufacturers can use wage premium data to benchmark recruiting difficulty. If manufacturing already pays a large premium in your state, workers may expect higher starting offers, better overtime terms, stronger benefits, and clearer advancement paths. Suppliers can use the same data to spot states where plants likely have more payroll intensity and larger operating budgets.

For marketing teams, this report helps separate high-headcount states from high-value labor markets. A state with fewer employees but a high premium may still be attractive for automation, training, quality systems, maintenance services, recruiting, ERP, and industrial lead generation campaigns. For site selectors, wage premium should be paired with energy prices, taxes, logistics, incentives, unionization, skills pipeline, and customer access.

Use the Census Annual Survey of Manufactures or Annual Integrated Economic Survey for shipments, materials, and capital expenditure data. Use BEA GDP by industry for value added. Use BLS Current Employment Statistics for monthly total nonfarm and manufacturing sector employment trends.

Research Notes on Manufacturing Wages

Manufacturing wages are often discussed as hourly wages, weekly pay, annual wage totals, and dollars per hour. This report uses annual pay because QCEW is an employer-reported government dataset, but production workers, manufacturing workers, service workers, machine operators, and each occupation can have different hours worked and different pay patterns inside the same state. The national average can hide those differences.

Economic research on wage inequality, import competition, deindustrialization, and the loss of manufacturing often compares manufacturing industries with nonmanufacturing work. Researchers such as Joel Elvery and Julianne Dunn at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland have written about manufacturing pay, economic policy, and how wages changed between 1979 and 2018. The Federal Reserve System and Census Bureau also track broader economics, county data, Puerto Rico data, and private sector changes that can help explain why some states compensate factory labor differently.

Use care when comparing 2022, 2023, and recent years. A one-year percent increase or decline can reflect mix shifts, plant openings, layoffs, high wages in one advanced manufacturing cluster, or lower wages in a labor-intensive subsector. The average percentage difference in this table is a 2024 snapshot, not a forecast for 2027.

Methodology

This report uses the 2024 BLS QCEW annual single-file download. Manufacturing average annual pay is taken from private ownership, NAICS 31-33. All private-sector average annual pay is taken from the QCEW total private industry row. The premium is calculated as manufacturing pay minus all-private pay, divided by all-private pay.

QCEW is built from unemployment insurance records. It counts covered wage and salary employment, not proprietor income, self-employed workers, unpaid family workers, or job opening counts. It is different from monthly CES payroll employment because CES tracks the pay period including the 12th of the month and is designed for monthly changes, seasonal adjustment factors, average hourly earnings, production and nonsupervisory workers, and data series revisions.