Managers, All Other

At $141,900 — $91,880 a year clear of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — Managers, All Other sits at the top of what BLS publishes. Read the gate before the figure: at this level there is always one, and it is usually measured in years.

This is a large occupation: 622,190 people work as Managers, All Other. Large occupations hire continuously and replace continuously, and the pay reflects both facts.

These management roles are usually reached by doing the underlying work first, so they suit people who want authority over a craft they already understand rather than management as its own career.

No verified preparation time is on file for Managers, All Other. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.

A quarter of the field earns under $102,880 and a quarter over $186,300: $83,420 between them, a ratio of 1.8x. Wide enough that the first offer you get tells you more about your prospects than the median does.

The 25th percentile is $102,880, $52,860 above the $50,020 typical American job. When even the floor is this high, the thing to investigate is the entry requirement rather than the pay.

Avoid it if you would find it hard to manage people you used to work beside as an equal.

There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 622,190 people employed as Managers, All Other; it did not count the people who trained for it and are doing something else, and a rate built without that denominator would be a number we made up.

A ratio of 1.8x — $102,880 to $186,300 — is wide enough that specialising inside Managers, All Other pays measurably. $141,900 is the middle of a range you can move within.

In cash terms the middle half of Managers, All Other runs $102,880 to $186,300 — $83,420 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $141,900.

Getting to $186,300, the 75th percentile, is worth $44,400 a year more than the $141,900 midpoint and $83,420 more than the $102,880 a quarter of Managers, All Other settle for.

$39,020 down to $102,880, $44,400 up to $186,300: the midpoint of Managers, All Other is centred in its own middle half. That symmetry is why the median and the average would say much the same thing here, which is not true of most pages on this site.

Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $49.46 at the bottom quarter, $68.22 at the midpoint, $89.56 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.