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Butchers and meat cutters

Also called Butcher, Meat cutter, Retail butcher, Journeyman butcher, Meat department associate

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 136,430 US butchers and meat cutters, with median pay of $40,140 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 145,930, in May 2021. The earliest figure here is a Census count of 87,000 from 1900, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for butchers and meat cutters: Boxed beef and case-ready packaging revolution, 1967 to 2000.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 2.4% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Butchers and meat cutters: jobs and pay since 1900 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/51-3021

Chicago

Future History. "Butchers and meat cutters: jobs and pay since 1900." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/51-3021.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_51_3021, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Butchers and meat cutters: jobs and pay since 1900}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/51-3021}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

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1700172517501775180018251850187519001925195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Butcher / Provision Dealer / Slaughterer (craft-trade era, retail and wholesale combined)
Known then as Butcher / Packing House Worker (industrial consolidation era, Union Stockyards)
Known then as Retail Butcher / Meat Cutter (post-Federal Meat Inspection Act, regulated craft era)
Known then as Journeyman Meat Cutter / Retail Meat Cutter (supermarket union era)
Known then as Meat Cutter / Meat Wrapper (case-ready transition era, declining union density)
Known then as Butcher / Meat Cutter (BLS SOC 51-3021, post-consolidation stable floor)
Known then as Butchers and Meat Cutters (BLS SOC 51-3021, artisan revival + supermarket mainstream dual track)
Known today as Butchers and Meat Cutters (BLS SOC 51-3021, artisan revival + supermarket mainstream dual track)
Projected to still be called Butchers and Meat Cutters (BLS SOC 51-3021, artisan revival + supermarket mainstream dual track)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
136K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$40,140
Est.

≈ $39,111 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1697

New York City's municipal market regulations, dating to the Dutch colonial period, required licensed butchers to slaughter and sell from designated public market stalls, preventing unregulated slaughter within the city. From the earliest Dutch settlement, butchers occupied a privileged and tightly regulated position at the top of the public market hierarchy -- their profession more tightly controlled than almost any other retail trade of the era.

Beat · 1865

The Union Stock Yard and Transit Company opens in Chicago on Christmas Day 1865, consolidating nine separate stockyards into one facility covering more than a square mile. By 1870 it is processing two million animals annually; by 1890, nine million. The Stockyards and the packing companies surrounding it (Armour, Swift, Morris, and their rivals) transform American meat supply from a locally slaughtered product to a nationally distributed industrial one. The disassembly line -- workers each performing a single task as the carcass moves past on overhead rails -- is the organizational innovation that makes scale possible.

Beat · 1877

Gustavus Swift makes his first successful test shipment of dressed beef using a modified refrigerated rail car, routing through the Grand Trunk Railway in the winter of 1877. In 1878 he hires engineer Andrew Chase to design a practical insulated car with top-mounted ice allowing chilled air to flow naturally downward. The refrigerated rail car separates slaughter from retail for the first time, beginning the long transformation of the retail butcher from someone who slaughters and cuts to someone who receives already-slaughtered product and performs only the secondary breakdown and customer-service work.

Beat · 1897

On January 26, 1897, the American Federation of Labor charters the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America, consolidating seven local unions in Chicago. The union initially organizes retail butchers of Irish and German heritage alongside the central and eastern European immigrants who form the majority of the industrial packing workforce. At founding, skilled workers earn $3.00-$3.50 per day; 60 percent of unskilled workers earn less than $6 per week. The 1904 nationwide strike draws 50,000 members but ends in defeat, with strikers blacklisted from the major plants.

Beat · 1906

Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle, depicting conditions in Chicago's Packingtown. Congress passes both the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act within months. Sinclair had intended to expose the exploitation of immigrant workers; the public instead reacted most viscerally to the food safety descriptions. "I aimed at the public's heart," Sinclair later wrote, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach." The Acts create the USDA inspection infrastructure that still governs every federally inspected meat operation today.

Beat · 1967

Iowa Beef Processors introduces boxed beef at its Dakota City, Nebraska, plant: carcasses are broken into vacuum-packed sub-primal cuts at the plant and shipped in boxes rather than as whole or half carcasses to retail. IBP had been founded in 1960 by Currier Holman and A. D. Anderson with $300,000 in Small Business Administration financing, building a one-floor plant close to feedlots and cheap energy near Dennison, Iowa. The boxed beef concept eliminates significant shipping weight and bone, lowers retail labor costs, and fits the growing supermarket model. IBP becomes the largest beef packer in the world by 1974.

Beat · 1979

June 5, 1979: the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of America merges with the Retail Clerks International Union to form the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the largest union in the AFL-CIO. The merger reflects a structural reality: the two workforces increasingly coexisted in the same supermarket buildings, with meat cutters and retail clerks covered by separate contracts but working in the same store. UFCW will go on to negotiate the grocery and meatpacking contracts that govern much of the remaining unionized retail butcher workforce.

Beat · 2020

COVID-19 strikes meat processing plants with exceptional severity. By February 2021, at least 53,000 workers at 569 meatpacking plants in the United States have tested positive and at least 277 have died. At one JBS plant in Utah, 54% of the workforce contracts the virus; at one Tyson plant in Texas, nearly 50%. The presence of a meatpacking plant in a county elevates local COVID infection rates by 51-75% above baseline. Plants are legally classified as critical infrastructure, and workers are required to continue operating under Executive Order even after major outbreaks. The pandemic reveals the concentrated geographic structure and labor vulnerability of the meat supply chain in ways that no prior disruption had.

Beat · 2025

Fortune reports that Whole Foods is expanding artisan butcher apprenticeship programs as AI reshapes adjacent retail occupations, positioning skilled meat craft as a differentiator at the premium end of the grocery market. The program reflects a recognition that whole-animal knowledge, customer advisory skill, and value-added production (house-ground blends, sausages, dry rubs) are services that pre-packaged supply chains cannot replicate, and that training a new generation of journeyman butchers requires deliberate institutional investment.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace butchers and meat cutters? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+2.4%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 51-3021 (Butchers and meat cutters): 138.4 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 141.7 thousand in 2035, a change of +3.3 thousand (+2.4%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (1.2% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
2.6%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 51-3021.00 Butchers and Meat Cutters. Shown: human-rated β = 0.026, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.053; GPT-4-rated β 0.132. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for butchers and meat cutters

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereComplete HACCP temperature logs, sanitation records, and lot-traceability documentation for each production shift, meeting USDA and FDA requirements

Complete HACCP temperature logs, sanitation records, and lot-traceability documentation for each production shift, meeting USDA and FDA requirements; AI food-safety platforms now generate HACCP plan templates and auto-populate digital checklists, cutting documentation time significantly while the butcher remains the named responsible person regulators require to sign off.[8],[9]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Pursue HACCP certification through AMSA or the International HACCP Alliance; a butcher who holds a formal certification is the floor lead regulators accept as the responsible party, creating a supervisory floor unavailable to uncertified coworkers.

AI is sitting alongside you hereEstimate weekly meat requirements by cut and species, place orders with suppliers, and track inventory against projected sales volume to minimize both stockouts and excess perishable waste

Estimate weekly meat requirements by cut and species, place orders with suppliers, and track inventory against projected sales volume to minimize both stockouts and excess perishable waste; AI demand-forecasting tools ingest POS data and surface reorder recommendations, but vendor relationship management and negotiating terms remain human work.[1],[7]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Learn to interpret POS-derived demand forecasts and build supplier relationships around flexible order minimums; butchers who reduce shrink and over-stock costs demonstrate measurable P&L impact that supports promotion to department manager.

AI is sitting alongside you hereSet up and maintain the meat display case, rotating product by date, arranging cuts for visual appeal, and repricing or repackaging items approaching sell-by date to minimize shrink

Set up and maintain the meat display case, rotating product by date, arranging cuts for visual appeal, and repricing or repackaging items approaching sell-by date to minimize shrink; AI-driven demand forecasting tools surface when to mark down and what volumes to build, but the physical arrangement and customer-facing decisions remain the butcher's call.[1],[7]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Learn the relationship between case layout, sell-through rate, and shrink; butchers who reduce shrink percentage save real dollars and are recognized by management even without a formal title change.

Where butchers and meat cutters go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Food Service Managers

Butchers who expand beyond the meat case into full food-service operations oversight move into the food-service-manager tier; the additional scope requires P&L accountability across multiple departments, but the food-safety, vendor-negotiation, and staff-training skills are already largely developed on the meat floor.

What you'd add
  • · Multi-department budgeting and food-cost control
  • · Food service manager certification (ServSafe Manager)
  • · Scheduling and hiring across a full kitchen or multi-station team
  • · Inventory management software beyond the meat department (MarketMan, BlueCart)
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of butchers and meat cutters changed since 1700?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Hand tools only: pole-axe, skinning knife, bone saw, cleaver (craft-guild era)

    The entire cutting operation of the pre-industrial butcher rested on a small set of hand tools that had not fundamentally changed since medieval guild practice: the pole-axe or pithing tool for slaughter, the skinning knife for hide removal, a short-bladed boning knife for separating muscle groups, and a heavy cleaver or chopper for dividing through bone. A skilled journeyman who could break a full beef carcass cleanly into primal and retail cuts in a single morning was a trained professional, typically having served a six-to-twelve month apprenticeship under a master. The wooden chopping block, replenished by hand-planing when surface hygiene required it, was the workstation. No mechanical advantage existed. Output was entirely a function of the cutter's speed and skill.

  • Refrigerated rail car (Gustavus Swift, 1877) + Union Stockyards disassembly line

    Gustavus Swift's successful test shipment of dressed beef using a refrigerated rail car in the winter of 1877 was the first technology to meaningfully separate slaughter from retail and to reorganize meat cutting into a factory context. Before Swift, livestock traveled live to eastern markets where local butchers slaughtered and cut on-site; after Swift, carcasses traveled east as dressed meat, concentrating the initial breakdown work at Chicago's Union Stockyards. Philip Armour's "disassembly line" organized skilled and unskilled workers into sequential stations, each performing one task on the carcass as it moved past on overhead rails. The Union Stockyards, which opened Christmas Day 1865, processed tens of thousands of workers' output by 1900 and slaughtered hundreds of millions of livestock between 1865 and 1900. For the retail butcher, the refrigerated rail car meant that the animal arriving at the shop was already slaughtered and partially broken down, transforming the traditional butcher's skill set from whole-animal slaughter toward the secondary breakdown and customer-facing retail work that defines the occupation today.

    Effect on the work

    The disassembly line at the Stockyards created a bifurcation in the meat workforce: highly paid skilled cutters at the retail counter, and lower-paid industrial workers on the factory floor. By 1900 the stockyards employed tens of thousands of workers; skilled retail butchers in downtown shops numbered an additional 87,000 nationally.

  • Federal Meat Inspection Act (1906) + USDA grading and inspection infrastructure

    Upton Sinclair spent seven weeks inside Chicago's packing district in late 1904, gathering material for The Jungle, published in 1906. The resulting public outcry produced the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906, which mandated USDA ante-mortem and post-mortem inspection of all livestock at federally inspected plants. For the retail butcher this was not primarily a tool but a regulatory context that reshaped daily practice: product now arrived with documented inspection status, the butcher was required to maintain documented sanitation records, and the USDA grading system (Prime, Choice, Good, Standard) introduced from the 1920s onward gave both butchers and customers a common vocabulary for quality. The regulatory infrastructure created a compliance dimension to butchering work that persists today in HACCP documentation.

  • Band saw, mechanical grinder, and vacuum packaging (supermarket meat department era)

    The postwar supermarket boom standardized the meat department format: a refrigerated display case, a separate cutting room behind, a band saw for bone-in cuts, and a mechanical grinder for hamburger and sausage. Virtually every supermarket across the country ran this model. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, cry-o-vac vacuum packaging was introduced into chain-store cutting rooms, enabling central warehouse cutting that served multiple retail locations. The band saw reduced the hand-saw skill requirement for bone-in cuts but created a new injury risk and a new equipment-maintenance task. Journeyman meat cutters were among the highest-paid hourly workers in American food retail, and the Amalgamated Meat Cutters union had achieved wage rates comparable to auto and steel workers by the early 1960s.

    Effect on the work

    The combination of strong union contracts and a full-service supermarket model made the journeyman meat cutter one of the most economically secure positions in the working class during the 1950s-1970s.

  • Boxed beef (IBP, 1967) and case-ready packaging revolution

    Iowa Beef Processors introduced boxed beef at its Dakota City, Nebraska, plant in 1967: instead of shipping whole carcasses, IBP broke down the animal at the plant into vacuum-packed sub-primal cuts shipped in boxes. Supermarket chains could now receive ready-to-portion cuts rather than full hindquarters and forequarters requiring a skilled cutter's primary breakdown. The savings in shipping weight, on-floor labor, and refrigerated space were substantial, and Walmart's decision in the late 1990s to purchase exclusively case-ready prepackaged meat signaled the completion of the transition at the largest retail scale. As of December 2000, case-ready beef was a small share of national volume but growing rapidly. The Supermarket News coverage noted that "butchers used to be the king" of the meat department and that one veteran cutter said, "They're not allowing the industry to grow. They're training no one for tomorrow."

    Effect on the work

    The boxed beef revolution transferred cutting work from thousands of retail floors to a handful of large centralized facilities, concentrating industrial cutting jobs in rural Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska at much lower wages than the unionized retail positions they replaced. Retail meat cutting employment fell over the 1975-2000 period.

  • AI vision portioning + FoodReady HACCP software + artisan revival (dual-track era)

    The contemporary era is characterized by two parallel developments that run in opposite directions but do not cancel each other out. On the industrial side, AI vision portioning systems such as the MARELEC PORTIO 3D use three sets of laser cameras to build a real-time 3D model of each cut and determine the optimal slice to hit a target weight at several cuts per second, automating the fixed-weight portioning task in high-volume processing. HACCP documentation software like FoodReady uses AI to generate compliance plans up to 70% faster and automate digital temperature logs. The Whole Foods apprenticeship program documented in 2025 signals that at least some major retailers are treating whole-animal skill as a differentiator worth investing in.

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Butchers and Meat Cutters employment and pay by year

On record since1700
Latest US employment136,430 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$40,140 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+2.4% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • Canada (NOC 63201)

    Employment, 2020
    17,450, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income, the EXACT SUM of the cited cells for NOC 63201 + 65202 (this US occupation has no single NOC unit-group equivalent), combined as Butchers and Meat Cutters, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. A sum of cited cells, not an estimate. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
    Median pay, 2020
    C$40,400, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 63201 Butchers - retail and wholesale, the dominant constituent of the combined Butchers and Meat Cutters (NOC 63201 + 65202), Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). This is the cited median of the dominant group, not a blend of the constituent medians. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
View all 27 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
190087,000$624Decennial Census 1900 (employment) Researched contextEst., Wikipedia (pay) Researched contextReport
1950200,000n/aEst., UFCW Researched contextReport
1975250,000$14,300Est., FRASER / BLS Bulletin 1925 Researched contextReport
2000134,250n/aBLS OEWS 2000 Official statisticReport
2003132,370$25,570BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
2004131,490$25,890BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
2005128,660$26,590BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
2006128,350$26,930BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
2007128,510$27,480BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
2008128,210$28,290BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
2009125,510$28,850BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
2010125,910$28,600BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
2011130,720$28,460BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
2012134,210$28,490BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
2013138,900$28,360BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
2014137,050$28,660BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015137,350$29,130BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016133,880$29,870BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017131,530$30,890BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018133,670$31,580BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019136,770$32,500BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020142,220$32,900BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021145,930$36,050BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022129,400$36,930BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023136,330$37,650BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024140,040$38,960BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025136,430$40,140BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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