What is the Pay Rate for Chefs?

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Becoming a chef in your culinary profession is vital for the development of your career. Becoming a chef will significantly increase your salary and will allow you to advance to much higher rates of payment. Usually, chef pay rates start off at $25,000 annually, but by the end of the person’s career, it can peak up to more than $100,000. It all depends on determination, skills, devotion, persistence and solid background in terms of education and after class-experience.

Salaries by the Type of Chef

There are different types of chefs with different salaries. The one at the top of the table is the executive chef, who is giving orders to the staff of the kitchen. He or she makes the connection between the customers and the restaurant. He or she makes the main decisions regarding the menu, meals and kitchen’s priorities. His or her salary usually starts from $50,000 then the executive chef pay rate can reach up to more than double this initial amount. The second-in-command is the chef-de-cuisine and his or her salary can go up to $55,000. Another secondary type of chef is the pastry chef, whose salary reaches $47,000 annually on average. Following the pastry chef are the sushi chef and the sous chef whose salaries go up to $40,000 with the minimal salary of $25,000.

Influence of Salaries by Other Factors

There are multiple ways of increasing your salary apart from your rank. Although, the biggest employers of chefs and culinary arts are the restaurant chains, they do not provide the best salaries for chefs, assistants or managers. The best salaries are rather found in individually owned places, like 5-star hotels or expensive popular destination resorts. The biggest calculated executive chef salary in the United States is around $120,000. You are much more likely to score a bigger payday, if you find a job at a hotel, resort, or country club rather than a restaurant, small diner of some sort or a pizza shop.

The best places in the US to get a bigger chef pay rates are Texas, New Jersey, Miami and Chicago and most definitely New York, according to the latest statistics. Numbers show that 90 percent of chefs are male and male salaries are higher than female by $15,000 on average. However, this trend is changing as more chefs are working and greater opportunities arise with catering, food trucks, and self-owned restaurants run by female executive chefs.

In addition, don’t forget that increasing your salary is a question of what gets to enter your curriculum vitae. If you have educational background, if you have attended culinary classes, then your chef pay rates will undoubtedly ascend. If you have culinary job experience in the past, this would be an advantage. The truth is that if you start off with a bigger salary from the very beginning, you will never go underneath it, provided of course you are keeping up the good work, since all your future employers will need to raise the bar.