Occupation / job
Public Relations Managers
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
At $146,910 — $96,890 a year clear of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — Public Relations Managers 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.
Employment stands at 74,850. Public Relations Managers is common enough to be recruited for continuously and specific enough that the experience travels — the combination that makes changing employer a working pay rise.
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 74,850 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.
Who should not do this
The quarters sit at $106,580 and $204,520 — 1.9x, or $8,161 a month apart. At that width the occupation contains genuinely different jobs, and which one you are being offered matters more than the title does.
The 25th percentile is $106,580, $56,560 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.
There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 74,850 people employed as Public Relations Managers; 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.
What the spread tells you
At 1.9x, the distribution for Public Relations Managers is open enough that specialisation starts to pay. The distance from $106,580 to $204,520 is mostly what you can do that others in the same title cannot.
In cash terms the middle half of Public Relations Managers runs $106,580 to $204,520 — $97,940 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $146,910.
The 75th percentile is $204,520. Reaching it from the $146,910 midpoint is $57,610 a year; reaching it from the $106,580 that the bottom quarter of Public Relations Managers earn is $97,940.
$57,610 separates $146,910 from the $204,520 top quarter, while only $40,330 separates it from $106,580. The range leans upward, which means the middle of Public Relations Managers has more room above it than a symmetric reading of the median would suggest.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for Public Relations Managers is $70.62 an hour. The quarters sit at $51.24 and $98.32, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
This is payroll data: it comes from employers, about people they employ. Anyone doing the work of Public Relations Managers for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $146,910 describes them.
The hourly number on this page is $146,910 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Public Relations Managers, so it is arithmetic rather than an effective rate.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else