Project Management Specialists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Project Management Specialists offer sit among all 1,006,160 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 1,006,160 jobs nationally, Project Management Specialists make up 0.65% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 116,240 of those jobs, the top three states hold 29.7%, and the deepest concentration sits in Maryland (location quotient 1.83, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $165,790, which is 2.8 times the $59,830 at the 10th, a difference of $105,960 annually. Because the mean wage ($108,100) sits above the median ($100,750), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts Texas first at 116,240 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Washington would lead at $117,030. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Project Management Specialists stands number 33 by employment and number 124 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Business and Financial Operations Occupations, the group median wage is $78,420 across 32 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 28% more than its group median, and it supplies 9.7% of the group's 10,351,430 jobs. In 16 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $100,750, 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 66,550 jobs, 6.6% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $71,900 a year, against $150,510 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $8,396 a month before tax, $3,875 biweekly, $1,938 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($76,950) to the 75th ($131,660) is worth $54,710 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 $110,825 would sit between the median ($100,750) and the 75th percentile ($131,660), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $76,950, is $23,800 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Business and Financial Operations Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Accountants and Auditors, Business Operations Specialists, All Other, Human Resources Specialists, Management Analysts, Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists, Buyers and Purchasing Agents. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.