What do cooks get paid

A host of factors influence your ability to earn in a kitchen, including:. The hospitality and food service industries serve a wide variety of gastronomic functions. Modern chefs and cooks work at:. In general, some of the most highly coveted Executive Chef jobs are found at:. Food-service cooking jobs requiring less training, and yielding less income potential might be found at:. Find Culinary Programs. ZIP Code. Graduated High School - Select One - Find Schools. There was little pleasure for Valerie Biega in her pre-work coffee routine.

The caffeine, rather, was what fueled her to push through each shift as a cook at a popular fried chicken restaurant in Brooklyn. She estimates that upward of 40 percent of her monthly income went to rent, another 20 percent each for her private health insurance and transportation, and another chunk covered her phone bill. Paying off her culinary school debt would have to wait. For many back-of-house staffers, the pains of long hours, paltry benefits, and paychecks sucked dry by the cost of living in cities with lauded restaurants are the industry norm.

More than a decade since the Great Recession, back-of-house jobs are still very much in demand. Despite these largely upward trajectories, cooks and chefs alike are struggling to keep afloat. Part of the problem is that real wage growth is flatlining , as it has for low-wage workers for several decades , according to the Pew Research Center. But Joshua Clark, an economist for the online real estate database company Zillow Group, says that a second contributing factor is skyrocketing housing costs, with rent inflation over the past decade outpacing wage growth.

That crunch is especially hard-felt by those at the lower end of the wage scale, like cooks and chefs. However, they typically toiled in the ranks for 20 years before achieving that position. The BLS reports a total of more than two million working cooks in , and that number is expected to grow by 10 percent by This will result in more than , additional positions.

However, the restaurant industry is notorious for its high turnover rates, and real-life employment prospects are better than this relatively small growth rate would suggest. Customer Stories. Research Reports. Payscale Index Track and compare wage-growth by city, industry, company size, and job category. Compensation Trends. Recent Compensation Trends Articles.

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