Purchasing Managers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Purchasing Managers worker at that point in the distribution, so $175,460 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

The occupation employed 81,240 people in May 2024, 0.05% of every job BLS counted. Texas is the largest employer at 8,100 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 26.3% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in District of Columbia, whose location quotient of 3.16 says this work is 3.16 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $107,430 at the 25th percentile, $139,510 at the middle, $175,460 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $133,640, a ratio of 2.6 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

The state spread for Purchasing Managers runs from the $173,130 median in New Jersey down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in Texas (8,100 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Purchasing Managers stands number 302 by employment and number 41 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 30% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.7% of the group's 10,966,830 jobs. In 12 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $139,510, 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 6,160 jobs, 7.6% 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, Las Vegas-Henderson-North Las Vegas, NV posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $106,290 a year, against $218,630 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, 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 $139,510 works out to $11,626 a month before taxes, $5,366 per biweekly paycheck, and $2,683 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($107,430) to the 75th ($175,460) is worth $68,030 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 $153,461 would sit between the median ($139,510) and the 75th percentile ($175,460), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $107,430, is $32,080 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

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Chief Executives, Architectural and Engineering Managers, Social and Community Service Managers, Education Administrators, Postsecondary, Facilities Managers, Natural Sciences Managers. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.