Chief Executives Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Chief Executives offer sit among all 211,850 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

BLS counted 211,850 Chief Executives jobs in May 2024, which is 0.14% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Alaska, where the location quotient is 2.06, meaning the occupation holds 2.06 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 36,980 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 27.8% of the national total.

BLS top-codes or suppresses part of this occupation's national ladder, so the published center is the median of $206,420 and the mean of $262,930. The state table below is the more useful negotiating document: it shows how far the same job title travels across the 49 states with published estimates.

Pay by state

Hawaii posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $231,500, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Chief Executives stands number 157 by employment and number 24 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Management Occupations, the group median wage is $106,980 across 38 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 93% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.9% of the group's 10,966,830 jobs. In 8 of the 37 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $206,420, 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 12,420 jobs, 5.9% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $124,300 a year, against $507,680 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $206,420 a year is $17,202 a month gross, $7,939 every two weeks, $3,970 a week. The top of this ladder is top-coded by BLS (shown as $239,200+), so the full experience premium cannot be printed from the published table; the 25th percentile, $126,080, is the firmest anchor for an early-career offer. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $17,202 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

Related occupations in Management Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Education Administrators, Postsecondary, Facilities Managers, Natural Sciences Managers, Purchasing Managers, Public Relations Managers, Education and Childcare Administrators, Preschool and Daycare. The full directory is on the Careers hub.