COOKED
The cage job is cash-in/cash-out at a window: redeeming TITO tickets and chips, cashing checks, processing markers, counting drawers, and reconciling shift paperwork — and ticket kiosks plus automated chip counters have already absorbed a large share of that volume. What remains is physical currency handling in a tightly controlled room, plus Title 31 AML documentation and CTR/SAR flagging, which software drafts better than a human but a licensed employee still submits. Gaming-board registration is a background-check credential, not a professional sign-off that protects the task list.
Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.
Median pay $28,040 → $37,580 +7.2% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
-5% 14,100 → 13,400 on the projections basis
Exposed, and shrinking
Both signals point the same way: the tasks are largely automatable and the BLS projects -5% by 2034. This is the case where the score and the forecast agree, and it is the one worth taking seriously.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~1,300 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
Cage CashierMutuel ClerkCasino WorkerVault CashierCasino CashierGaming CashierPurse PaymasterDual Rate BankerGambling CashierGaming Cage WorkerCasino Cage CashierGaming Cage CashierCasino Gaming WorkerGambling Cage CashierCasino Services Rep (Casino Services Representative)Cage and Players Club Rep (Cage and Players Club Representative)
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: judgment & accountability .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier At 7 the job sits just above fully-automatable because ticket kiosks and chip-sorting machines already handle redemption volume, but the residual duties — hand-counting a $200k drawer down to the penny at shift change, breaking bank for table fills, issuing and settling markers on a credit line, and physically sealing and transferring cash to the count room — still need a person in the cage, which is why it isn't a 4.
Some physical or field component A 9 reflects genuine manual work — currency counters, chip racks, coin bags, drop boxes, standing at a window for eight hours under dual-control procedures — but all of it happens in one hardened, camera-covered room on a single floor, nothing like a technician working in unpredictable outdoor or customer-site conditions.
Certification preferred, not legally required Gaming-board registration or a key/non-key license is a fingerprint-and-background clearance that lets you touch the money, not an examination-based credential that makes you personally answerable for the transaction; at 6 you get slightly more protection than an unlicensed clerk because the state can pull your card, but the casino's compliance officer signs the CTRs and SARs and eats the Title 31 penalties.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs At 5 the discretion is real but bounded: you decide whether an ID is acceptable, whether structuring looks deliberate, whether a check gets cashed — but each of those runs against a written internal-control procedure with a supervisor one step away, and escalation, not your own call, is the prescribed answer to anything ambiguous.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (7/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (6/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (5/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (5/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 16 of this occupation's 32 points (50%).
Embodiment (9/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
No occupation passed every test: close enough to gambling cage workers on skills and subject matter, at least 10 points more resistant, no big jump in training, no new licence, no pay cut, and not shrinking on its own. That happens for 223 of the 654 occupations here that aren't SAFE, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving the section off.
The usual reason is that exposure travels with the skill profile. The jobs most similar to yours tend to be exposed for the same reasons yours is, so the near neighbours don't clear the gap — and the ones that do are a different kind of work, not a transfer of what you already know. Read that as a limit of this method, not a verdict that you're stuck: it only compares whole occupations, and it cannot see specialisation, industry, or anything you'd bring that isn't in a federal skill survey.
Here is that claim on your own job rather than in the abstract. These are the three occupations closest to this one by skill and subject matter — the places the work would most naturally transfer — with what the register scores them:
That is the whole problem in three lines. The nearest work is not meaningfully safer, so there is no move here that trades a similar skill set for a better verdict. This is not us running out of ideas — it is what the neighbourhood looks like.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 44/100 — EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift as kiosks and automated chip counters take the remaining routine redemption volume, leaving the job as exception handling: disputed tickets, counterfeit and altered currency, marker collection disputes, cash-structuring judgment, and drawer variance investigation. Genuine two-tier occupation, but the shrinking headcount comes with it
FinCEN or a state gaming board making the casino's designated AML compliance signer a named, individually-registered person for each CTR/SAR filed from the cage — i.e. extending something like the Bank Secrecy Act's personal-liability posture (FinCEN has already pursued individual compliance officers, e.g. the 2014 MoneyGram Haider action) down to cage-level filers, with gaming-board registration converted into a revocable AML credential rather than a background check
Nevada Gaming Commission Reg 6A / Title 31 examination practice treating the cage supervisor as the accountable decision-maker on suspicious-activity escalation, structuring refusals, and marker credit extension under ambiguity — with cited findings naming the individual, so the remaining role is the discretionary call the software cannot own
Continued cash-preference among high-limit and unbanked patrons, plus state rules barring cashless wagering conversion (several jurisdictions still restrict digital wallets at the table), keeping physical currency verification, vault counts, and dual-custody transfers as hands-on work in a surveilled room
The limit. No plausible trust-premium route: patrons choosing a kiosk over a window is the revealed preference, and no buyer pays extra for a human cashier. Even the liability and judgment levers raise the score of a role that keeps shrinking in headcount — resistance per remaining worker, not more workers.
| Las Vegas-Henderson-North Las Vegas, NV | 1,650 | $38,900 +4% |
| Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ | 540 | $44,540 +19% |
| Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA | 490 | $36,500 -3% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 480 | $43,710 +16% |
| Atlantic City-Hammonton, NJ | 360 | $41,430 +10% |
| San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA | 320 | $38,260 +2% |
| Tulsa, OK | 310 | — |
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL | 260 | $36,560 -3% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 40 | $55,260 +47% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 150 | $49,920 +33% |
| Tucson, AZ | 220 | $47,320 +26% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 32. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.