Marketing Managers

The $166,790 midpoint is $9,730 a month above the $50,020 typical American job, which puts Marketing Managers near the ceiling of published federal wage data. Everything at this level is gated, and the gate is usually years long.

This is a large occupation: 395,240 people work as Marketing Managers. Large occupations hire continuously and replace continuously, and the pay reflects both facts.

Marketing, advertising and sales management suits people who can commit a budget to an outcome they will only ever partly be able to attribute, and argue for it again next year.

How long it takes to become one of the 395,240 people doing this is not something we have a source for. BLS counts and pays them; it does not record how they got there, and we would rather say so than guess.

$93,390 separates the bottom quarter of Marketing Managers at $123,020 from the top quarter at $216,410. At a 1.8x ratio the midpoint is a weak guide to your own first year — find out which end you would be entering at.

The 25th percentile is $123,020, $73,000 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 need your contribution to be provable; attribution in this function is contested every budget cycle.

You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 395,240 is a headcount of the employed, which is a numerator without a denominator — everyone who qualified and never got hired is missing from it, and we will not estimate them to complete a percentage.

From $123,020 to $216,410 at a ratio of 1.8x is wide enough that two people with the same job title have materially different jobs. $166,790 sits in the middle of that and describes neither of them especially well.

Put in money rather than ratios: $123,020 at the 25th percentile, $166,790 at the midpoint, $216,410 at the 75th. $93,390 separates the quarter of Marketing Managers at the bottom from the quarter at the top.

Getting to $216,410, the 75th percentile, is worth $49,620 a year more than the $166,790 midpoint and $93,390 more than the $123,020 a quarter of Marketing Managers settle for.

$166,790 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $43,770 above the bottom quarter, $49,620 below the top one. A symmetric distribution like this is the case where the median genuinely does describe the typical person.

On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Marketing Managers is $80.18 an hour. The quarters sit at $59.14 and $104.04, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.