Food Service Managers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Food Service Managers worker at that point in the distribution, so $82,300 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 244,230, or 0.16% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 38,960 jobs; the top three states sum to 33.2% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: South Dakota posts a location quotient of 1.67, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $53,090 at the 25th percentile, $65,310 at the middle, $82,300 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $63,040, a ratio of 2.5 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Washington posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $92,290, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Food Service Managers stands number 140 by employment and number 327 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 39% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.2% of the group's 10,966,830 jobs. In 19 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $65,310, 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 14,210 jobs, 5.8% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 377 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, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $44,290 a year, against $97,380 in Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA. 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 Food Service Managers paycheck, gross, is $2,512 every two weeks on an annual $65,310, which is $5,442 a month and $1,256 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($53,090) to the 75th ($82,300) is worth $29,210 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $71,841 would sit between the median ($65,310) and the 75th percentile ($82,300), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $53,090, is $12,220 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Lodging Managers, Fundraising Managers, Entertainment and Recreation Managers, Except Gambling, Legislators, Advertising and Promotions Managers, Compensation and Benefits Managers. The full directory is on the Careers hub.