Occupation / job
Purchasing 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
The $148,080 midpoint is $8,171 a month above the $50,020 typical American job, which puts Purchasing Managers near the ceiling of published federal wage data. Everything at this level is gated, and the gate is usually years long.
84,320 people are employed as Purchasing Managers. At that scale every large metro has a real market, and the difference between a good year and a bad one is usually which employer you are at rather than whether anyone is hiring.
These roles suit people who want to own a system rather than a number — the good ones are judged on whether the function runs, not on whether it grew.
No verified preparation time is on file for Purchasing Managers. 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.
Who should not do this
$115,550 to $182,270 — 1.6x, or $5,560 a month between the quarters. An unremarkable spread, which means the useful planning number for Purchasing Managers is the bottom of it rather than the middle.
The 25th percentile is $115,550, $65,530 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 want the top job; running a function well is not the usual route to running the organisation.
There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 84,320 people employed as Purchasing 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
A 1.6x ratio is the most common shape in this data: some room to move, none of it quick. Read $148,080 as where you might be after years in Purchasing Managers, and $115,550 as where you would start.
In cash terms the middle half of Purchasing Managers runs $115,550 to $182,270 — $66,720 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $148,080.
Between $115,550 and $182,270 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $148,080. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $34,190; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $66,720.
$148,080 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $32,530 above the bottom quarter, $34,190 below the top one. A symmetric distribution like this is the case where the median genuinely does describe the typical person.
Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $71.19 at the midpoint for Purchasing Managers, $55.55 at the 25th percentile and $87.62 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.
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 Purchasing Managers for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $148,080 describes them.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Purchasing Managers, the hourly figure is $148,080 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else