Marketing Managers
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for marketing managers is Massachusetts, at $212,020. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and South Dakota comes out ahead, worth $142,940. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for marketing managers: Massachusetts leads at $212,020 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting South Dakota to $142,940 in real terms. Price level, not tax, is the operative variable for this occupation — and it is the one absent from essentially every published wage comparison.
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
$166,790
People doing it
395,240
Highest paid
$212,020
MA
Best off, really
$142,940
SD, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$90,260
Highest tenth
$293,610
Lowest, really
$77,502
HI
States with data
48
National average
$177,770
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.09%
SD, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job roughly doubles depending on the state. That is a lot. Some of it is prices, because dear places pay more to make up for costing more. Most of it is not. In real money the range is still $77,502 to $142,940.
- About 395,240 Americans work in this job, on a middle wage of $166,790. Big enough that where you live changes the arithmetic.
- Not every state reports this one. The figures here cover 48 jurisdictions, and the middle wage across them is $166,790. A state you do not see is one with no published number, not one paying nothing. Of those published, Massachusetts pays most.
- Interstate variation in marketing managers pay approaches twofold nominally. The standard explanation — that high-wage states are merely high-cost states — is only partly supported here: after tax and price adjustment the range remains $77,502 to $142,940, so the majority of the gap represents a real difference in what the work buys.
- With 395,240 workers, marketing managers sits in the middle of the BLS headcount distribution. The state-level spread described above therefore applies to a meaningful population rather than a niche one.
- BLS publishes an occupational median for marketing managers in 48 jurisdictions, short of the full set. ⚠️ Absence reflects estimate suppression — small samples or disclosure rules — rather than absence of employment, so the state comparison above is over the published subset.
Pay band: Marketing Managers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $90,260 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $166,790 |
| Top tenth earn over | $293,610 |
| This salary | $166,790 |
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 Marketing Managers
The national median for this job
$166,790around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $90,260 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $166,790 |
| Top tenth | $293,610 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Marketing Managers, state by state
The national median for this job
48states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | West Virginia · $98,750 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Massachusetts · $212,020 |
| Spread | $113,270 |
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 | $147,880 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $152,179 |
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 | $167,750 | $125,923 | $142,940 |
| MA | $212,020 | $147,499 | $136,273 |
| WY | $161,580 | $121,706 | $133,967 |
| MT | $165,580 | $116,446 | $129,034 |
| VA | $187,820 | $129,808 | $128,843 |
| CO | $182,730 | $128,830 | $127,074 |
| NC | $165,480 | $118,278 | $125,641 |
| MN | $173,300 | $118,946 | $120,859 |
| KS | $154,510 | $108,540 | $120,647 |
| WA | $172,270 | $129,013 | $118,838 |
| GA | $160,760 | $113,722 | $117,604 |
| NY | $181,200 | $124,897 | $116,048 |
| IL | $162,860 | $114,664 | $115,992 |
| CA | $193,620 | $130,256 | $115,700 |
| TX | $147,880 | $112,342 | $115,608 |
| AR | $136,520 | $99,985 | $115,579 |
| NJ | $180,040 | $125,045 | $114,843 |
| CT | $169,240 | $118,037 | $113,838 |
| PA | $150,810 | $109,715 | $112,528 |
| ID | $142,090 | $101,707 | $111,246 |
| SC | $143,290 | $102,705 | $110,226 |
| TN | $131,990 | $101,481 | $109,692 |
| IN | $136,260 | $100,410 | $108,923 |
| IA | $131,120 | $96,516 | $108,729 |
| DC | $177,170 | $120,271 | $108,544 |
| ND | $125,580 | $95,910 | $108,285 |
| OH | $132,330 | $98,791 | $107,601 |
| MI | $138,510 | $100,302 | $106,495 |
| UT | $139,830 | $100,617 | $105,911 |
| MD | $154,160 | $109,330 | $105,160 |
| OK | $126,920 | $92,805 | $105,119 |
| FL | $142,620 | $108,747 | $105,118 |
| KY | $128,930 | $94,995 | $105,004 |
| MO | $130,550 | $95,298 | $103,854 |
| NH | $143,280 | $109,198 | $103,657 |
| WI | $133,600 | $96,105 | $103,231 |
| OR | $161,560 | $107,717 | $102,861 |
| LA | $120,650 | $90,474 | $102,410 |
| NM | $122,980 | $90,628 | $100,267 |
| ME | $135,380 | $95,761 | $98,624 |
| AL | $120,160 | $88,400 | $98,255 |
| AZ | $132,220 | $98,735 | $97,656 |
| NE | $110,570 | $82,289 | $91,051 |
| AK | $116,270 | $90,626 | $89,098 |
| NV | $107,550 | $84,491 | $87,123 |
| MS | $100,940 | $75,896 | $86,945 |
| WV | $98,750 | $74,667 | $83,174 |
| HI | $117,770 | $84,174 | $77,502 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for marketing managers, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $166,790 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- The take-home numbers here use the simplest possible household: one filer for marketing managers, no children, no pension contributions, standard deduction. Real life usually reduces the tax bill below this. City and school-district income taxes are left out, and in Ohio or Pennsylvania that is a real omission. The best after-tax state here is Massachusetts, at $147,499.
- Levelling out prices for marketing managers is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — Hawaii sits at the bottom on $77,502.
- All wage figures for marketing managers are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $166,790. Within-state dispersion typically exceeds between-state dispersion in this data, so an individual's expected wage is determined more by experience, sector and employer than by the state comparisons presented here.
- Retained-pay figures for marketing managers model a single filer taking the standard deduction with no dependants and no pre-tax deferrals — deliberately the simplest household, so the comparison across states isolates geography rather than personal circumstances. Local income taxes are outside the model; Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland residents should expect a meaningfully lower figure than $147,499, which leads in Massachusetts.
- The price deflation applied to marketing managers uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is Hawaii at $77,502. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Hawaii anchors the bottom at $77,502 — and the two source series are dated independently.