Cooks, Restaurant in Arkansas

A state-to-national comparison of pay, employment scale, and occupational concentration using one BLS release.

What the state comparison shows

BLS estimated 11,270 Cooks, Restaurant jobs in Arkansas in May 2025. The occupation represented 8.65 jobs per 1,000 wage-and-salary jobs in the state. That is an employment estimate for the OEWS universe, not a count of openings and not a forecast of future hiring.

The state mean annual wage was $31,650, compared with a national mean of $38,730 for the same occupation and period. The state estimate is 18.3% lower. Keeping occupation and reference period fixed makes the arithmetic comparable, but the difference does not adjust for living costs, hours, industry mix, or experience.

The location quotient is 0.95. A value of 1.00 would match the occupation’s national share of employment, so this result is close to the national job mix. Location quotient is a relative concentration measure. It does not show vacancies, growth, working conditions, or whether the occupation is easy to enter. Read it beside the absolute employment estimate.

The median annual wage in Arkansas was $30,180, 19.3% below the national median of $37,390. Within the state, the mean is 4.9% above the median. That gap gives a compact clue about distribution shape without identifying any individual worker’s likely pay.

BLS reports a mean hourly wage of $15.22 for this state-occupation cell. Use the hourly figure with other hourly OEWS estimates and the annual figure with annual estimates. Different schedules, overtime, unpaid time, bonuses, and employer pay practices can make a personal annual total diverge from a survey annualization.

Method definitions matter to the comparison. Review location quotient, employment estimate, mean wage, and median wage. The state wage comparison guide gives a repeatable checklist for keeping units and periods aligned.

This page exists because all six required values are published: employment, jobs per 1,000, location quotient, annual mean, annual median, and hourly mean. If BLS suppresses any required value, LaborBrief does not create the page. The gate prevents an attractive URL from standing in for evidence and keeps “not available” from becoming a fabricated estimate.

For context, return to the national Cooks, Restaurant profile or open the Arkansas labor-market overview. The state reference also links to minimum-wage information, worker-rights sources, and unemployment benefit provisions. These legal pages use separate effective-date sources rather than inferring rules from wage statistics.

Primary sources

• BLS OEWS state and national tables — BLS OEWS, May 2025
• BLS OEWS questions and answers — methods and suppression