Machinists earn about $58,750; 288,300 jobs, slow growth ahead

Slow growth and 26,100 openings a year sound contradictory until you separate the two. Openings come mostly from replacement, workers retiring or leaving the trade, so a field can add few net jobs and still hire steadily. Growth of 1% to 2% over the decade is the net; 26,100 a year is the churn.

The openings line is an annual average, and O*NET's own label hides that. It reads 'Projected job openings (2025-2035) 26,100', which looks like a ten-year sum. BLS publishes occupational openings as a yearly average across the projection period, so anyone quoting 26,100 as a decade total is off by roughly a factor of ten.

The $58,750 median is a midpoint on O*NET's 2025 wage data. O*NET and the BLS Handbook draw on the same wage survey but update on their own schedules, so for part of each year one can carry a newer wage than the other. Cite whichever source you name, and do not splice a wage from one with an outlook from the other. A number is only as clean as the single source you can point back to.

This is a headcount of people, not machines. Robots increasingly tend the same lathes and mills, but they turn up in the IFR's installation data, not in this occupation line. Keep the human employment figure and any robot figure in separate columns.

Cite the pay as a $58,750 median, or $28.24 an hour, from O*NET, and name O*NET as the source. Naming the source is what lets a reader reconcile it with any BLS figure they already have.

Write the openings as an annual average: about 26,100 a year from 2025 to 2035. Pair it with the slow growth line and say the openings are mostly replacement, which is why the two are consistent.

Watch the denominator: 288,300 is the human machinist headcount, so do not blend it with robot machine-tending counts from a robotics source. The two describe the same shop floor from different sides and do not add up to a single figure.

Reading O*NET's 'Projected job openings (2025-2035) 26,100' as a decade total. The label invites it, and it is wrong by about tenfold. BLS reports occupational openings as an annual average over the projection period, so the figure means roughly 26,100 openings every year.

Reading the openings as job growth. Employment is projected to grow only 1% to 2%, and the openings are mostly replacement hires for people who leave. Openings and net change are separate lines on O*NET, and conflating them overstates how much the field is expanding.

Mixing an O*NET wage with a BLS projection, or the reverse, as if the two were one dataset with one vintage.

Treating the machinist count as a measure of automation. It counts people, and robots that tend the same machines are counted in robotics data.

We loaded the O*NET occupation summary for machinists, SOC 51-4041.00, and confirmed each figure in its text: the $58,750 median, the $28.24 hourly wage, 288,300 employees, the 26,100 projected openings, and the slower-than-average growth line.

We report the openings the way BLS defines them, as an annual average across the 2025-2035 projection period, rather than as a ten-year sum. O*NET's own heading reads like a decade total, which is the single most common way this occupation gets misquoted. The welders line settles it: O*NET lists 40,300 openings under the same heading, and the BLS Handbook gives that identical 40,300 as openings projected each year.

The wage and employment counts, which O*NET states directly for its 2025 vintage, rate High. The openings projection and the growth outlook rate Medium, because projections get revised and a slow outlook can tip either way. We chose O*NET over the BLS Handbook because O*NET reports machinists on their own, while the Handbook combines them with tool and die makers, and we held the human occupation strictly apart from robot install counts.

Refreshed in October 2026 for the 2025 to 2035 projections. The previous version, built on the 2024 to 2034 projections, reported 299,500 machinists, about 29,500 openings a year and an outlook of little or no change.