How Much Should a Machinist With 5 Years' Experience Actually Make?

A few weeks ago, a machinist posted a simple question in hireCNC's MACHINIST Facebook group — the same 600,000-member community hireCNC runs. He'd just taken a new position at $24/hr after five years in the trade, a pay cut from the $28/hr he'd been making before. He wanted to know why five years wasn't buying him more.

The post passed 800 comments. Nobody agreed on the answer.

The split

One side of the thread said five years is barely anything — that it takes ten years to be "competent," fifteen to twenty to really know the trade, and that anyone expecting top pay after five is getting ahead of themselves. Several people who'd been machining for three, four, even five decades said they still learn something new every week, and that a five-year machinist is closer to the beginning of the learning curve than the end of it.

The other side said years are close to meaningless on their own — that a sharp machinist can out-earn someone with twenty years in the trade if those twenty years were spent doing the same repetitive setup at the same shop, and that plenty of five-year machinists are already running circles around "veterans" who never learned to program or never left their first employer. Several people in this camp reported making $35–50/hr at the five-year mark; others reported still being under $25/hr after fifteen or twenty years.

Both sides had a point, and reading the whole thread end to end, that's really the finding: years of experience explain almost none of the actual spread in what people reported earning. Something else is doing that work.

What actually explains the range

Strip out the arguing and a few real patterns show up again and again in what commenters actually reported making.

Industry matters more than tenure. People in aerospace, medical, defense, and oilfield machining consistently reported higher pay than people in general job shops or automotive supply — sometimes by $10–15/hr for similar years in the trade. Union shops came up constantly as a pay floor other shops don't have.

Region swings the number hard. The same skill set was reported paying anywhere from the high teens in parts of the Midwest and South to $45–55/hr in Texas, California, and pockets of the Northeast. Several people described literally moving states for the same job and getting a substantial raise for it.

Programming is the clearest lever anyone named. Setup-and-operate roles topped out lower than roles that involved programming — CAM, G-code, multi-axis work — almost every time it came up. This tracks with what hireCNC's own board data shows: across 289 current shop-floor postings, the pay ladder runs from Operator ($23.50/hr median) to Setup ($33.00/hr) to Programmer ($39.75/hr) — roughly $16/hr and $34,000 a year of difference between the bottom and top of that ladder, regardless of years in the trade.

Moving shops came up more than any other single piece of advice. Dozens of commenters, independently, said the same thing: staying loyal to one employer for years rarely produces real raises, while changing shops every one to three years — and negotiating hard each time — reliably does. A common thread: never volunteer your current pay in an interview, ask what the range is instead, and don't take the first offer.

And a real amount of it was just tone, not data. A meaningful share of the thread was older machinists telling a newer one he hadn't earned the right to ask the question — dismissive, sometimes genuinely hostile. Several commenters, including some with decades in the trade themselves, pushed back on that directly: gatekeeping and "you don't know anything yet" culture came up repeatedly as a reason newer people leave the trade, not a reason they should stay quiet about pay.

What the actual numbers say

Set the Facebook argument next to real data and the picture gets clearer.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median machinist's pay at $58,750/year — about $28.25/hr — as of May 2025, across the entire existing workforce, including people who've been at it for decades. hireCNC's own board tells a different, more current story: the median pay currently being offered across live CNC job postings on hirecnc.com is $33.50/hr, with the typical posting ranging from about $28.50 to $39.00/hr.

That gap between "what the whole workforce earns" and "what's being offered right now" isn't a contradiction — it's two different questions. BLS measures everyone already in a seat, some of them for thirty years at the same rate. A live job posting measures what an employer has to offer today to actually win someone who's shopping around. If you're the person in the Facebook thread trying to figure out whether $24/hr is fair for five years in, the second number is the one that actually answers your question — and on hireCNC's board right now, it's running well above $24.

The practical takeaway

If you're five years in and wondering whether you're underpaid, the thread — chaotic as it was — pointed at something useful: don't ask "what does experience deserve," ask "what's actually being posted for this kind of work, in this industry, in my region, right now." That number moves a lot more than years-in-the-trade does, and it's knowable — current CNC machinist postings show real, current pay ranges by role and by state, not guesses from a comment section.

And if you're an employer reading this from the other side: this is the exact conversation your next posting is competing against. A vague listing that doesn't name a real number invites exactly the reaction that started this thread. A posting with an honest, competitive range attached to it doesn't.

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, "Machinists and Tool and Die Makers," May 2025 wage data. hireCNC board pay data pulled live from current job postings on hirecnc.com, September 23, 2026 (n=289 shop-floor postings; refreshed quarterly). Discussion referenced from a public post in hireCNC's MACHINIST Facebook group; individual commenters are not named or quoted directly out of respect for their privacy.