The Datum Report

Occupation 9132 · Elementary occupations

Packers, bottlers, canners and fillers

Half of full-time packers, bottlers, canners and fillers in the UK earn more than £26,152 a year, and half earn less.

Packers, bottlers, canners and fillers pack, wrap, fill, label and seal containers by hand or machine.

How people enter it

No academic qualifications are required. Training is typically provided on-the-job and varies according to the type of packing and product. Formal courses are run for specialist packing.

What the work involves

• selects appropriate cylinder, ensures that there is no corrosion or other damage and fills with gas
• fills tubes, ampoules, bottles, drums, barrels, bags, sacks, cans, boxes and other containers by hand using measuring/weighing aid or by positioning container under feeder spout
• packs heavy goods in crates and boxes using hoist, mobile crane or similar lifting equipment
• loads machine with packaging containers, materials, adhesive, etc., loads hopper with items to be packaged/wrapped, monitors filling, wrapping and packaging, adjusts controls as necessary and clears any blockages
• examines cans, bottles and seals and rejects any that are faulty
• labels goods by hand or machine
• packs specialist items according to specifications and completes necessary documentation

Also called

Factory worker (packing) · Packaging operator · Packer · Paint filler

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for packers, bottlers, canners and fillers, full-time employees, 2023 to 2025. Each point is that year's ASHE April snapshot as published — revisions are not backfilled into earlier years, and a year ONS withheld is a gap rather than a joined line.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Year-on-year change

The change from each year to the next, in per cent, computed from the figures in the chart above — so the two cannot disagree.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Pay by region

Median gross annual pay for full-time employees, ranked, against the UK figure. 10 of 11 regions are published: ONS withholds a cell where the survey sample cannot support it, and those are shown as gaps rather than dropped — an absent region is not a region without the work in it.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Period 2025. Table

Every regional figure

ONS does not publish occupational pay below region. Cells the survey could not support are shown as withheld, with its reason — adding a region split to a specific occupation leaves roughly a tenth of cells publishable.

Common questions

Classified alongside this

Elementary process plant occupations n.e.c. · Industrial cleaning process occupations