Time Machine

Tool and die makers

Name: Tool and Die Makers: employment and wages since 1940
Creator: Future History
License: https://futurehistory.earth/terms

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 56,930 US tool and die makers, with median pay of $64,050 a year. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 130,000 from 1940, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for tool and die makers: CAD/CAM integration, 1982 to 2015.

Official statistic: latest count and pay.Researched context: earliest figure.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to decline 9.2% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

Official statistic

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35.

Last updated 11 October 2026.

Cite this page

APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Tool and die makers: jobs and pay since 1940 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/51-4111

Chicago

Future History. "Tool and die makers: jobs and pay since 1940." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/51-4111.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_51_4111, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Tool and die makers: jobs and pay since 1940}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/51-4111}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

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18251850187519001925195019752000now

2026

Known then as Toolmaker / Die Sinker / Gunsmith / Instrument Maker (craft era, no unified title)

Known then as Toolmaker / Die Maker (industrial era, separate specialties)

Known then as Tool and Die Maker (unified title; Census and labor-union category)

Known then as Tool and Die Maker (standard; SIC manufacturing classification)

Known then as Tool and Die Makers (BLS SOC 51-4111; plural form standardized)

Known today as Tool and Die Makers (BLS SOC 51-4111; plural form standardized)

Projected to still be called Tool and Die Makers (BLS SOC 51-4111; plural form standardized)

Data from the May 2025 survey

US Employment

57K

Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic

Report an error

Median Annual Wage

$64,050

≈ $62,408 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic

Report an error

Beat · 1819

Thomas Blanchard invents the Blanchard lathe at the Springfield Armory, Massachusetts. The lathe uses a master pattern to guide cutting tools automatically, reproducing irregular shapes like gunstocks with unprecedented consistency. It is the first machine tool designed specifically to replace hand-tracing skill with mechanical linkage, and it creates demand for a new class of craftsmen who can build and maintain master patterns and gauges: the direct ancestors of the tool and die trade.

Beat · 1900

Frederick Winslow Taylor and Maunsel White demonstrate high-speed steel (HSS) cutting tools at the Paris Exposition of 1900. High-speed steel, which retains hardness at cutting temperatures that would soften carbon steel, tripled cutting speed from 30 to 90 surface feet per minute and caused a sensation at the exhibition. The demonstration transforms what a toolmaker can accomplish in a shift and sets off a decade of rapid improvement in machine tool capability.

Beat · 1919

Ex-Cell-O Tool and Manufacturing Co. is established in Highland Park, Michigan by a group of tool and die makers who are all former employees of Ford Motor Company. The founding illustrates the pattern of spinoff entrepreneurship that built the Detroit-area tooling ecosystem: skilled toolmakers trained in major auto plants leave to start their own shops, which then supply dies, fixtures, and gauges back to the industry that trained them. The Midwest dense network of independent tool and die shops becomes the backbone of American automotive manufacturing.

Beat · 1939

The Tool and Die Strike of 1939 begins July 2, when 800 workers at Fisher Body No. 21 plant in Detroit walk out under UAW leader Walter Reuther's direction, demanding higher wages for skilled workers and formal recognition of the UAW as sole GM bargaining agent. The strike spreads across Detroit, Cleveland, and Saginaw. General Motors concedes on August 4, offering a higher wage scale for skilled workers. The April 1940 UAW election wins 68% support across 200,000 GM workers, and the first comprehensive UAW-GM national contract follows in June 1940. The 1939 tool and die action demonstrates that toolmakers, though few in number, could paralyze auto production by stopping the flow of dies and fixtures that kept stamping lines running.

Beat · 1943

The National Tooling and Machining Association (NTMA) is founded in 1943, during the peak of wartime tool and die demand. The "Arsenal of Democracy" conversion of US industry to war production had created an enormous demand for toolmakers: every factory making tank hulls, bomber fuselages, rifle components, and artillery shells required precision dies and fixtures, and demand for toolmakers far exceeded supply. NTMA establishes apprenticeship standards that remain the gold standard of the trade: a 4-year registered apprenticeship including 144 hours of classroom training and 2,000+ hours of hands-on work per year (approximately 8,000-10,000 hours total) to reach journeyman status.

Beat · 1976

The first CNC Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM) machine is produced in 1976. Wire EDM, which cuts hardened die steel by passing a traveling wire electrode through the workpiece and eroding the metal with controlled electrical sparks, had been in development since the 1960s. The CNC version automates the wire path, enabling a toolmaker to program a complex die cavity profile and walk away while the machine runs unattended through a hardened steel block. This is the first technology that allows a toolmaker to cut hardened steel to tight tolerances without hand-grinding, which had been one of the most time-consuming and skill-dependent tasks in the toolroom.

Beat · 1981

From 1981 to 1983, employment in the US machine tool industry declines by a third, and continues falling; by 1991 it is half its 1981 level. The causes are overlapping: the 1981-1982 recession slashes auto production; imports from Germany, Japan, and Switzerland take market share in precision tooling; and early CNC adoption reduces the labor content per machine tool produced. Tool and die employment does not fall as sharply as machine-tool production workers because toolrooms serve the entire manufacturing base, not only machine-tool builders, but the structural weakness of the 1980s manufacturing sector sets the conditions for the occupation's long decline.

Beat · 2009

General Motors and Chrysler file for bankruptcy protection in 2009 during the financial crisis, triggering a wave of closures and consolidations across the automotive supplier base. Michigan alone loses tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs. Because tool and die shops are heavily concentrated in Michigan, whose rural manufacturing counties remain the single largest employment cluster for the occupation nationwide, the auto crisis hits the occupation disproportionately hard. The 2008-2010 recession is the sharpest single contraction in the occupation's postwar history.

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, ONS ASHE figures (UK pay and jobs) 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.

How it began · 1820

The trade now called tool and die making crystallized at the Springfield Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, during the 1810s and 1820s. The Armory had been commissioned by Congress in 1794 to manufacture standardized muskets, and the challenge of producing thousands of interchangeable parts drove it to invent a new kind of skilled worker: one whose job was not to make the final product but to make the machines and fixtures that made the product. Thomas Blanchard's 1819 lathe, which traced a master gunstock pattern to cut identical copies automatically, was the first great product of this tradition. The craftsmen who built and maintained those master tools, gauges, and fixtures became the founding lineage of the tool and die trade. By the mid-19th century the Connecticut River Valley, centered on Springfield and running north through Chicopee and Holyoke, had become the precision-manufacturing capital of the United States, supplying skilled toolmakers to the sewing machine, typewriter, bicycle, and eventually automobile industries. When Samuel Colt opened his Hartford revolver factory in 1855, his superintendent's first priority was to hire and develop a toolroom of craftsmen who could build the jigs and gauges that made interchangeable production possible. These workers had no unified title yet: Census records from 1850 and 1860 scatter them across "machinists," "instrument makers," "gun-stock makers," and "die sinkers." But by the 1880s, as the automobile era approached, they were recognizably a single trade. The tool and die maker was not the person who ran the stamping press or turned the lathe: he was the person who built the die that the press relied on, the gauge that checked the part, and the jig that held the workpiece. Every mass-produced object in the industrial economy rested on his work.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace tool and die makers? 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
Target year 2035
-9.2%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 51-4111 (Tool and die makers): 56.7 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 51.5 thousand in 2035, a change of -5.2 thousand (-9.2%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers. The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error

Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for tool and die makers

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

AI is sitting alongside you here Verify dimensions, alignments…

, and clearances of finished parts for conformance to specifications, using measuring instruments such as calipers, gauge blocks, micrometers, or dial indicators.^[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you here Visualize and compute dimensions, sizes, shapes…

, and tolerances of assemblies, based on specifications.^[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you here Study blueprints, sketches, models…

, or specifications to plan sequences of operations for fabricating tools, dies, or assemblies.^[2]

Where your edge is

Tools of the era

How has the work of tool and die makers changed since 1820?

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

Hand tools, manual lathes, and the American System of precision gauging
The founding generation of toolmakers worked entirely with hand files, scrapers, surface plates, and manual lathes to create master gauges and fixtures that enabled interchangeable production. The Springfield Armory's contribution was as much about measurement as machining: by introducing Go/No-Go gauges and precision surface plates, it gave toolmakers a way to verify that parts made on different machines were genuinely identical. Every stamping die, every milling fixture, every inspection gauge began as a hand-fitted precision artifact. The craft was inherently slow and skilled-intensive, which is why the toolmakers were always the highest-paid workers on the factory floor.
Effect on the work
The manual-gauge era was not a constraint on the occupation but its foundation. Without precision hand-fitting, interchangeable manufacture was impossible, and without interchangeable manufacture, there was no mass production. The toolmakers were not the victims of this era but its architects.
High-speed steel (1900), carbide tooling (1920s), and Ford assembly-line die tooling
Frederick Winslow Taylor and Maunsel White's 1900 demonstration at the Paris Exposition of high-speed steel cutting tools, which could run three to four times faster than carbon steel without losing hardness, transformed what tool and die makers could accomplish. By the 1920s, Karl Schroter's cemented carbide (Widia) doubled cutting speeds again. The Ford River Rouge complex, which opened in 1927, employed thousands of toolmakers to build and maintain the stamping dies and fixtures for a fully integrated production system. Detroit's tool and die shops became the supporting infrastructure of the entire American automobile industry: when Ford changed a body panel, hundreds of new dies had to be designed, built, and qualified, and every one of them required toolmakers. The National Tooling and Machining Association (NTMA), founded in 1943, formalized apprenticeship structures for this wartime and postwar workforce.
Effect on the work
Employment of tool and die makers grew in near-lockstep with the automotive industry through the mid-20th century. The U.S. auto industry's dominance of world production through the 1950s and 1960s sustained a large and well-compensated toolmaking workforce, with most workers concentrated in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts.
CNC machining centers and Wire EDM (commercial CNC from early 1970s; first CNC EDM 1976)
Computer Numerical Control machining, commercially available from the early 1970s and accelerating through the 1980s as microprocessors reduced cost, transformed the toolroom. A toolmaker who had previously guided a milling cutter by hand through a complex 3D profile could now program the path and let the machine execute it with greater precision and repeatability. Wire Electrical Discharge Machining (Wire EDM), which used a traveling metal wire to cut hardened steel by controlled electrical spark erosion, appeared in commercial form in the mid-1970s: the first CNC EDM machine was produced in 1976. By the early 1980s, Wire EDM had become the standard method for cutting hardened die steel to tight tolerances, replacing days of hand-grinding with hours of unattended spark erosion. These tools did not eliminate the toolmaker but they changed what the toolmaker spent time on: less cutting metal, more programming and setup.
Effect on the work
The NBER research on computerized machine tool diffusion found that CNC adoption from 1981 onward reduced overall production employment in exposed industries, while raising demand for high-skilled workers who could program, set up, and troubleshoot the machines. Tool and die makers were in the high-skill cohort who benefited from or adapted to CNC, unlike the semi-skilled operators they largely replaced.
CAD/CAM integration (AutoCAD 1982, Mastercam 1983, parametric solids 1990s)
AutoCAD's 1982 release and Mastercam's 1983 introduction of computer-aided manufacturing brought digital design directly into the toolroom. By the 1990s, parametric solid-modeling packages like Pro/ENGINEER and SolidWorks allowed tool and die designers to build a three-dimensional mathematical model of a die cavity, validate it for material flow, and output CNC toolpaths, all in one connected workflow. The toolmaker's job shifted again: mastery of blueprints and manual calculations gave way to proficiency with CAD/CAM software. Shops that made the transition invested heavily in workstations and training; those that did not found it progressively harder to compete. The employment decline between 1998 and 2010 tracked with this transition: the same software that made individual toolmakers more productive also reduced the number of toolmakers needed for a given volume of work, while offshoring to Mexico, China, and other lower-cost regions accelerated the structural contraction.
Effect on the work
A reduction in US tool and die employment occurred between 1998 and 2010 (per CRS Report R42411, consistent with FRED and BLS data), driven by CAD/CAM-enabled productivity gains, offshore competition (particularly Chinese die shops entering the market after 2001 WTO accession), and the contraction of the domestic auto industry.
Hybrid additive/subtractive manufacturing and AI-assisted CAM (metal 3D printing, generative toolpath optimization)
Metal additive manufacturing, particularly selective laser sintering and direct metal laser sintering of tool steel, reached commercial toolroom viability in the early 2010s. By 2025, hybrid additive/subtractive manufacturing systems, which combine laser sintering and CNC milling in a single machine, had become what industry analysts describe as the "killer app" of the modern toolroom: a conformal cooling channel that would take weeks to wire-EDM can now be 3D-printed in hours, reducing injection-mold cycle times. AI-assisted CAM packages (Mastercam, Siemens NX, Autodesk Fusion) now generate and optimize toolpaths using machine-learning models trained on millions of cutting operations, reducing programming time for complex geometry. The toolmaker's role has shifted further toward programming, machine qualification, and problem-solving at the boundaries of what software can resolve without human judgment. The present-day daily-driver tools are high-end CAM software suites, 5-axis CNC machining centers, Wire EDM, and coordinate measuring machines (CMM) for final inspection.
Effect on the work
Employment has continued declining, between 2010 and 2024. Retirements are outpacing new entrants, creating a skills gap that is actually tightening wages for the remaining workforce even as overall headcount falls.

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Tool and Die Makers employment and pay by year

On record since1820

Latest US employment56,930 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Latest US median pay$64,050 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Outlook-9.2% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

View all 26 years of cited US data, each linked to its source

Tool and Die Makers in the US: employment and pay by year, with sources
Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source	Report
1940	130,000	n/a	Est., BLS Bulletin No. 1120 (1953)[1] Researched context	Report
1951	200,000	n/a	Est., BLS Bulletin No. 1120 (1953)[1] Researched context	Report
2000	142,000	$41,110	Est., Estimated total employment for Tool and… (employment)[2] Researched contextBLS OEWS 2000 (pay)[4] Official statistic	Report
2003	104,210	$42,990	BLS OEWS May 2003 [3] Official statistic	Report
2004	99,390	$42,740	BLS OEWS May 2004 [3] Official statistic	Report
2005	99,680	$43,580	BLS OEWS May 2005 [3] Official statistic	Report
2006	96,960	$44,290	BLS OEWS May 2006 [3] Official statistic	Report
2007	92,560	$45,090	BLS OEWS May 2007 [3] Official statistic	Report
2008	85,610	$46,430	BLS OEWS May 2008 [3] Official statistic	Report
2009	73,640	$46,900	BLS OEWS May 2009 [3] Official statistic	Report
2010	66,530	$46,930	BLS OEWS May 2010 [3] Official statistic	Report
2011	70,320	$46,650	BLS OEWS May 2011 [3] Official statistic	Report
2012	76,430	$47,000	BLS OEWS May 2012 [3] Official statistic	Report
2013	78,700	$47,960	BLS OEWS May 2013 [3] Official statistic	Report
2014	75,950	$48,890	BLS OEWS May 2014 [3] Official statistic	Report
2015	74,510	$50,290	BLS OEWS May 2015 [3] Official statistic	Report
2016	72,210	$51,060	BLS OEWS May 2016 [3] Official statistic	Report
2017	73,510	$52,480	BLS OEWS May 2017 [3] Official statistic	Report
2018	72,700	$52,750	BLS OEWS May 2018 [3] Official statistic	Report
2019	70,770	$53,920	BLS OEWS May 2019 [3] Official statistic	Report
2020	61,190	$54,760	BLS OEWS May 2020 [3] Official statistic	Report
2021	63,630	$57,000	BLS OEWS May 2021 [3] Official statistic	Report
2022	61,730	$59,800	BLS OEWS May 2022 [3] Official statistic	Report
2023	58,150	$61,490	BLS OEWS May 2023 [3] Official statistic	Report
2024	55,130	$63,180	BLS OEWS May 2024 [3] Official statistic	Report
2025	56,930	$64,050	BLS OEWS May 2025 [3] Official statistic	Report

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See all roles in Manufacturing

Hand tools, manual lathes, and the American System of precision gauging (1820 to 1900)

High-speed steel (1900), carbide tooling (1920s), and Ford assembly-line die tooling (1900 to 1970)

CNC machining centers and Wire EDM (commercial CNC from early 1970s; first CNC EDM 1976) (1970 to 1995)

CAD/CAM integration (AutoCAD 1982, Mastercam 1983, parametric solids 1990s) (1982 to 2015)

Hybrid additive/subtractive manufacturing and AI-assisted CAM (metal 3D printing, generative toolpath optimization) (2012 to present)

Tool and Die Makers employment and pay by year

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