General and Operations Managers
What the pay figures show
- Two answers for this job. Best paid: New Jersey, at $173,690. Tax does not change that. Best off: South Dakota, at $119,393 once local prices count. Tax was not what separated them. Rent was.
- New Jersey's $173,690 median for general and operations managers survives the tax adjustment intact, so state income tax is not a differentiator in this occupation's geography. It does not survive price deflation: South Dakota takes the top position at $119,393. Housing is where regional price variation concentrates, which is why the reordering appears at this step and not the previous one.
Compare this career across states
Choose your filing status and local taxes, compare pay, and keep a shortlist.Compare wage and personal-pay outcomes by state, with selected resident local taxes and saved career choices.
Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$105,770
People doing it
3,503,020
Highest paid
$173,690
NJ
Best off, really
$119,393
SD, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$50,090
Highest tenth
$253,390
Lowest, really
$67,378
MO
States with data
51
National average
$134,940
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.09%
SD, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Geography does a lot of the work in this job. Pay roughly doubles between the lowest state and the highest. Tax and prices narrow that gap. They come nowhere near closing it — the real range is still $67,378 up to $119,393.
- About 3,503,020 people in the country do this job. Very few jobs are this big. That is part of why its geography is worth setting out with care.
- Every state reports this one. All 51 jurisdictions publish a figure, and the middle wage is $105,770, so the comparison above leaves nobody out.
- The nominal spread for general and operations managers approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $67,378 to $119,393, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- 3,503,020 workers are employed nationally in general and operations managers. At this scale the occupation's wage geography is a macroeconomic fact as much as a career one, and small per-worker differentials aggregate into substantial regional flows.
- All 51 jurisdictions publish an occupational median for general and operations managers, so the spread described above is a complete national range rather than a range across a reported subset.
Pay band: General and Operations Managers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $50,090 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $105,770 |
| Top tenth earn over | $253,390 |
| This salary | $105,770 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in General and Operations Managers
The national median for this job
$105,770around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $50,090 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $105,770 |
| Top tenth | $253,390 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
General and Operations Managers, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Arkansas · $74,050 |
|---|---|
| Highest | New Jersey · $173,690 |
| Spread | $99,640 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $103,230 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $106,231 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| SD | $137,400 | $105,179 | $119,393 |
| NJ | $173,690 | $121,109 | $111,229 |
| DC | $168,000 | $114,783 | $103,591 |
| DE | $137,220 | $97,230 | $97,962 |
| CO | $131,840 | $96,286 | $94,974 |
| WA | $133,750 | $102,684 | $94,586 |
| CT | $137,220 | $98,073 | $94,583 |
| WI | $118,730 | $86,763 | $93,196 |
| AL | $111,790 | $82,838 | $92,073 |
| NH | $124,680 | $96,485 | $91,589 |
| MS | $106,680 | $79,704 | $91,308 |
| TN | $106,970 | $84,083 | $90,886 |
| AK | $116,630 | $90,879 | $89,347 |
| IN | $108,170 | $81,766 | $88,699 |
| LA | $101,790 | $77,772 | $88,032 |
| VA | $122,080 | $88,449 | $87,791 |
| ND | $98,170 | $77,237 | $87,203 |
| NY | $130,860 | $93,765 | $87,121 |
| WY | $99,700 | $78,969 | $86,924 |
| RI | $117,380 | $87,184 | $85,970 |
| MA | $127,220 | $92,180 | $85,164 |
| SC | $106,080 | $78,897 | $84,674 |
| TX | $103,230 | $81,452 | $83,820 |
| MD | $117,930 | $86,447 | $83,150 |
| NM | $98,630 | $74,714 | $82,661 |
| OH | $97,700 | $75,592 | $82,333 |
| NC | $101,950 | $76,993 | $81,786 |
| NV | $99,390 | $78,751 | $81,203 |
| PA | $103,130 | $78,216 | $80,221 |
| GA | $103,730 | $77,227 | $79,863 |
| MI | $99,530 | $74,870 | $79,493 |
| CA | $124,390 | $88,810 | $78,886 |
| OK | $90,430 | $68,879 | $78,018 |
| FL | $101,580 | $80,292 | $77,612 |
| IL | $103,570 | $76,710 | $77,598 |
| UT | $97,850 | $73,313 | $77,170 |
| KS | $92,840 | $69,251 | $76,976 |
| MT | $91,380 | $69,314 | $76,807 |
| VT | $98,640 | $73,823 | $76,394 |
| IA | $87,690 | $67,799 | $76,379 |
| ME | $98,860 | $72,952 | $75,133 |
| MN | $99,340 | $73,484 | $74,666 |
| AZ | $94,800 | $73,554 | $72,750 |
| NE | $85,090 | $65,523 | $72,500 |
| HI | $108,180 | $78,156 | $71,961 |
| WV | $82,500 | $63,979 | $71,269 |
| OR | $103,490 | $73,130 | $69,833 |
| KY | $79,370 | $62,006 | $68,540 |
| ID | $80,390 | $61,977 | $67,790 |
| AR | $74,050 | $58,643 | $67,789 |
| MO | $79,300 | $61,828 | $67,378 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for this job as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $105,770, which means half of everyone doing this work earns less than that. Where you land depends on how long you have done it, who you do it for, and which city you do it in.
- Take-home figures for this job assume one person filing alone, with no dependants and nothing going into a pension before tax. Any of those lowers the tax and raises what you keep, so treat these as the plain case rather than your case. Local city income taxes are not included either, and in a few states those matter. In New Jersey, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $121,109.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for this job. Inside any state, a big city costs far more than a small town, so this is a fair way to compare states with each other and a poor way to price a specific move. The wage figures and the price figures are also from different years. At the bottom of the range sits Missouri, on $67,378.
- These are distribution medians for general and operations managers, with a national value of $105,770. They describe a midpoint rather than an expected offer, and the within-occupation spread — visible in the tenth and ninetieth percentile figures — is wide enough that a state-level median is a weak predictor for any individual worker.
- Take-home calculations for general and operations managers assume a single filer with no dependants, the standard deduction, and no pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions. Each omitted item reduces taxable income, so the figures function as a lower bound on retained pay for this household shape; the highest such figure is $121,109, in New Jersey. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- Real-terms results for general and operations managers rest on statewide regional price parities, which average over intra-state variation that is itself larger than much of the interstate variation. They support comparison between states and not the pricing of an individual relocation; Missouri anchors the distribution at $67,378. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.