Producers and Directors Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Producers and Directors worker at that point in the distribution, so $131,160 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 145,270, or 0.09% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 35,650 jobs; the top three states sum to 50.6% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: District of Columbia posts a location quotient of 4.20, 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: $59,810 at the 25th percentile, $83,480 at the middle, $131,160 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $155,470, a ratio of 4.6 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

California posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $122,150, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Producers and Directors stands number 210 by employment and number 191 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations, the group median wage is $66,220 across 36 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 26% more than its group median, and it supplies 7.3% of the group's 1,989,300 jobs. In 6 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $83,480, 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 28,760 jobs, 19.8% 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, Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk, VA-NC posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $61,850 a year, against $160,500 in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, 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 $83,480 works out to $6,957 a month before taxes, $3,211 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,605 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($59,810) to the 75th ($131,160) is worth $71,350 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 $91,828 would sit between the median ($83,480) and the 75th percentile ($131,160), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $59,810, is $23,670 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Commercial and Industrial Designers, Film and Video Editors, Camera Operators, Television, Video, and Film, Broadcast Announcers and Radio Disc Jockeys, Media and Communication Workers, All Other, Special Effects Artists and Animators. The full directory is on the Careers hub.