Financial Managers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Financial Managers offer sit among all 818,620 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

The occupation employed 818,620 people in May 2024, 0.53% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 96,860 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 28.3% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Connecticut, whose location quotient of 2.26 says this work is 2.26 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

BLS top-codes or suppresses part of this occupation's national ladder, so the published center is the median of $161,700 and the mean of $180,470. The state table below is the more useful negotiating document: it shows how far the same job title travels across the 51 states with published estimates.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is New York at $215,740; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Financial Managers stands number 44 by employment and number 29 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 51% more than its group median, and it supplies 7.5% of the group's 10,966,830 jobs. In 11 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $161,700, 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

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 77,970 jobs, 9.5% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

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, $99,260 a year, against $296,600 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $161,700 works out to $13,475 a month before taxes, $6,219 per biweekly paycheck, and $3,110 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($118,360) to the 75th ($214,210) is worth $95,850 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 $177,870 would sit between the median ($161,700) and the 75th percentile ($214,210), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $118,360, is $43,340 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Management Occupations

Sibling occupations in Management Occupations: Facilities Managers, Natural Sciences Managers, Purchasing Managers, Public Relations Managers, Education and Childcare Administrators, Preschool and Daycare, Education Administrators, All Other. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.