Restaurant Chefs Make Terrible Money; Female Chefs Make Even Less

In case our insider's guide to culinary school didn't scare you away from your culinary dreams, these numbers just might.

A new study from the American Culinary Federation found that of all the chefs who responded, restaurant chefs were paid the least.

Results showed that line cooks make on average $23,000 a year; sous chefs around $38,000.

For executive chefs, a male executive chef earned on $71,000 average. That's $40,000 less than corporate executives or managers in the industry (with total average compensation of $111,000).

And of course, for females it's even worse. Female executive chefs annually earn $52,000 on average, a $19,000 difference when compared to their male counterparts.

Couple all of this with the long hours (23 percent of executive chefs worked more than 60 hours a week), and cooking it up in the restaurant industry isn't looking like a great gig after all.

Culinary educators have an average salary of $65,415, health care workers averaged at $63,994, and workers from private clubs averaged $83,753. Better yet, work as a research chef (1 percent of all respondents), where the median compensation is $100,000.

The Daily Byte is a regular column dedicated to covering interesting food news and trends across the country. Click here for previous columns.