General and Operations Managers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($47,420) to the 90th ($239,200 or more). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 3,584,420, or 2.32% of the U.S. total. Texas leads the state table with 454,720 jobs; the top three states sum to 27.8% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: District of Columbia posts a location quotient of 2.19, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

BLS top-codes or suppresses part of this occupation's national ladder, so the published center is the median of $102,950 and the mean of $133,120. 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 District of Columbia at $167,270; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, General and Operations Managers stands number 4 by employment and number 107 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 4% less than its group median, and it supplies 32.7% 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 $102,950, 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 187,400 jobs, 5.2% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Hot Springs, AR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $77,020 a year, against $201,600 in Trenton-Princeton, NJ. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $8,579 a month before tax, $3,960 biweekly, $1,980 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($67,160) to the 75th ($164,130) is worth $96,970 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $113,245 would sit between the median ($102,950) and the 75th percentile ($164,130), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $67,160, is $35,790 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.