Agents and Business Managers of Artists, Performers, and Athletes Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Agents and Business Managers of Artists, Performers, and Athletes offer sit among all 14,220 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

With 14,220 jobs nationally, Agents and Business Managers of Artists, Performers, and Athletes make up 0.01% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 5,960 of those jobs, the top three states hold 66.3%, and the deepest concentration sits in California (location quotient 3.57, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

BLS top-codes or suppresses part of this occupation's national ladder, so the published center is the median of $96,310 and the mean of $165,600. The state table below is the more useful negotiating document: it shows how far the same job title travels across the 26 states with published estimates.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 26 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Wisconsin at $114,210; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Agents and Business Managers of Artists, Performers, and Athletes stands number 623 by employment and number 145 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Business and Financial Operations Occupations, the group median wage is $78,420 across 32 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 23% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.1% of the group's 10,351,430 jobs. In 2 of the 20 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $96,310, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 5,180 jobs, 36.4% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 24 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro--Franklin, TN posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $89,840 a year, against $161,040 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $96,310 works out to $8,026 a month before taxes, $3,704 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,852 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($63,100) to the 75th ($168,850) is worth $105,750 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $105,941 would sit between the median ($96,310) and the 75th percentile ($168,850), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $63,100, is $33,210 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Business and Financial Operations Occupations

Sibling occupations in Business and Financial Operations Occupations: Claims Adjusters, Examiners, and Investigators, Loan Officers, Personal Financial Advisors, Logisticians, Cost Estimators, Meeting, Convention, and Event Planners. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.