What Construction Management Graduates Earn

Median earnings at 1, 4, and 5 years (College Scorecard)

Nothing on this page is a survey response or a recruiter's claim: the $74,821 year-one median and the $100,149 year-five median for Construction Management come from federal earnings records pooled across 104 bachelor's programs. The headline median weights programs by graduates counted (3,404 at year one); the second column is the unweighted median program, printed so the method stays visible.

Earnings in this field climb $25,328 between the first and fifth year, a 34% rise that beats the all-fields pattern (the median field in this dataset pays $45,010 at year one and $65,763 at year five). Early-career growth this shape usually means the first job is a foothold: licensure, a portfolio, or a first promotion does the heavy lifting.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $74,821 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $73,161, and graduates who did not earn $74,744, a gap of $1,583. Read it as a map of where each group studied and the networks they carried in, not as the degree paying two different wages for the same work.

Inside its own CIP family, Construction Management ranks 1 of 19 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $78,466. Its closest sibling is Insurance at $97,318, below this field's $100,149. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Construction Management stands number 13 by five-year earnings and number 18 by first-year earnings, and number 59 from the lowest median debt. Those three ranks together are the field's fingerprint: high earn rank with a low debt rank is the combination students are actually shopping for, and this field's spread between them is 46 places.

The debt side of the same degree

The median graduate in this field leaves school owing $19,625 in federal loans, the graduate-weighted median across the 49 programs reporting debt. That is 26% of the first-year median earnings, or about 3.1 months of gross pay at $74,821 a year. On the standard 10-year plan at the 2026-27 undergraduate rate of 6.52%, the payment is $223 a month and interest adds $7,140 over the life of the loan. Price your own borrowing with the student loan payoff calculator, and test the whole degree in the college ROI calculator or the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

The national median hides the real spread: inside Construction Management, individual programs post five-year medians far from $100,149 in both directions. Below are the highest, filtered to programs with 30 or more graduates counted at five years; Brigham Young University sits first at $119,150.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of Brigham Young University's counted graduates earn less than $119,150. Weigh any program here against its own price using the net price estimator and the degree cost calculator.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 14.3% of the 2,171 graduates counted at five years, so the top of the table is a thin slice and not the field's center; and the leading program's five-year median of $119,150 sits 19% above the national field median of $100,149. Its median debt, $11,000, runs below the field median of $19,625, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.