High paying food service jobs in Merced, CA

Every food service occupation below is ranked by its median annual wage in Merced, CA. Read the percentile range, not just the median: the gap between the 10th and 90th inside a single food service job is usually wider than the gap between two different ones, so where you land in a field matters more than which field you pick.

Cost of living: prices in Merced, CA run 1.7% below the national average (2024), so a Merced, CA salary is worth about 1.02× its face value in national terms. That scales every wage here by the same factor — it changes what the numbers mean, not their order.

Local wage estimates are suppressed more often than state ones — BLS withholds any figure too few local employers report — so an occupation missing here simply has no published local estimate.

Wages: BLS OEWS, May 2025 · Cost of living: BEA regional price parities, 2024

Ranked among the occupations common enough to employ roughly one in every three thousand workers in Merced, CA. The rarer ones are real jobs — but a 1,190-person occupation at the top of a list answers a different question than the one most readers are asking.