Print Shop Payroll Average Wage: Sources, Numbers and Access in 2026

Four programs publish the number, and each cuts it differently. OEWS reports occupation-level employment and wages inside printing industry 323100, with roughly fifteen data types per occupation — employment, hourly and annual means, and percentile wages. County Business Patterns fixes the aggregate bill: first-quarter and annual payroll by geography and six-digit NAICS. CES tracks monthly earnings for industry 32323000 from January 1990. Statistics Canada publishes salaries and wages annually for every Canadian printing code from 323113 to 32312.

Three cautions before quoting that number. CBP publishes payroll totals, not wage rates, so the division yields an implied average rather than a published mean; the employment denominator is a single mid-March week, not an annual average of full-time equivalents; and the headline cells carry noise flags — EMP_NF, QP1_NF and AP_NF all read G, meaning 0 to under 2 percent noise, so treat the quotient as solid to roughly that band. Part-time and seasonal staff pull the implied average below a full-time wage rate, which is exactly why role-level OEWS estimates belong next to it in any benchmarking memo.

For history, CBP runs annually from 1986 to 2023 as zipped CSV (the county file alone runs about 108 MB), and the five-year Economic Census benchmarks of 2017 and 2022 anchor the series.

Five steps take you from zero to a role-level wage table, all free:

1. Register at data.bls.gov/registrationEngine. Registered users get 500 queries per day, 50 series per query and 20 years per query against the Public Data API; unregistered calls drop to 25 queries per day, 25 series and 10 years, with both tiers capped at 50 requests per 10 seconds.

1. Or take the whole file. The complete May 2025 OEWS release ships as a single 80 MB ZIP (oesm25all.zip) whose all_data_M_2025.xlsx runs 413,528 rows and 32 named columns — TOT_EMP, A_MEAN, A_MEDIAN and seven further percentile columns — covering roughly 830 SOC occupations from a six-panel sample of about 1.1 million establishments.

1. Filter to printing industry 323100. National industry-specific estimates reach most 4-digit NAICS industries plus selected 5- and 6-digit ones, so both 323 and its components appear. One honesty note carried in Datadory's verification log: six-digit-industry OEWS series IDs use an encoded prefix (the observed pattern reads OEUN000000022--232310xxxx), and the mapping should be confirmed before any large harvest.

The same integration key also reaches the monthly side of pay: roughly 20 CES series for industry 32323000 cover hourly and weekly earnings alongside employment, each observation flagged P for preliminary until revisions settle.

Government tables stop at occupations; associations cut pay by job title, and the depth sits behind membership. PRINTING United Alliance — Industry Economics & Market Research granularises at job titles for compensation in its Wages, Salaries and Benefits human-resource reports, run under Chief Economist Andy Paparozzi, who joined in July 2018 after 31 years at NAPL. The same program's Key Financial Ratios Program, launched November 2023, tracks twenty metrics including value added, gross profit, selling expenses, administrative expenses and EBITDA as percentages of sales — the profitability frame a wage number alone lacks. Reports are a member benefit behind login at printing.org.

Germany offers the most quotable public ratio. The bvdm — Bundesverband Druck und Medien Branchenbericht line for 2023, calculated from Statistisches Bundesamt data for establishments with 50 or more employees, shows an average 444 establishments employing 55,748 people on nominal revenue of €10,145 million — about €182,000 of revenue per employee — with a wage share (Lohnquote) of 22.0 percent of revenue. Sector-wide, bvdm estimates roughly 95,000 employees across some 6,000 predominantly small and mid-sized companies, about 83 percent of which have fewer than 20 socially insured workers.