Natural Sciences Managers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Natural Sciences Managers offer sit among all 100,870 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 100,870 jobs nationally, Natural Sciences Managers make up 0.07% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 14,120 of those jobs, the top three states hold 31.7%, and the deepest concentration sits in Massachusetts (location quotient 3.73, 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 $161,180 and the mean of $173,500. 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

Massachusetts posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $218,800, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Natural Sciences Managers stands number 267 by employment and number 30 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 0.9% of the group's 10,966,830 jobs. In 8 of the 48 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $161,180, 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 8,780 jobs, 8.7% 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, Indianapolis-Carmel-Greenwood, IN posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $101,590 a year, against $248,510 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, 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 Natural Sciences Managers paycheck, gross, is $6,199 every two weeks on an annual $161,180, which is $13,432 a month and $3,100 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($114,110) to the 75th ($214,820) is worth $100,710 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 $177,298 would sit between the median ($161,180) and the 75th percentile ($214,820), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $114,110, is $47,070 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: Education and Childcare Administrators, Preschool and Daycare, Education Administrators, All Other, Training and Development Managers, Lodging Managers, Fundraising Managers, Entertainment and Recreation Managers, Except Gambling. The full directory is on the Careers hub.