VP and Director Salary Benchmarks by Industry

The median Financial Manager in the United States earned $161,700 in base salary in May 2024, according to BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics data released in April 2025. That number gets cited constantly in salary negotiations and then stripped of all context. It collapses a Director of FP&A at a regional bank with a VP of Finance at a publicly traded tech firm into one figure. Understanding where you actually sit requires disaggregating it by industry, geography, and total compensation — and then understanding what BLS data can and cannot tell you about the VP and Director tier specifically.

The SOC codes that best map to VP and Director-level corporate roles — Financial Managers, Marketing Managers, Sales Managers, Human Resources Managers, and General and Operations Managers — show median base salaries ranging from roughly $103,000 to $162,000 nationally. Medians obscure the real action. At the 90th percentile, OEWS stops publishing an exact number for Financial and Marketing Management because wages exceed the survey’s $239,200 top-code. That compression at the top is the first thing this dataset shows that most coverage overlooks: for VP and Director roles in high-paying industries, BLS figures systematically understate what the market actually pays.

Key figures at a glance

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, May 2024 data (released April 2, 2025). 10th and 90th percentile figures published by BLS OOH for Financial Managers and Marketing Managers only in this reference period; dashes indicate BLS did not publish the specific percentile figure. Employment figures rounded. OEWS top-code applies at $239,200 annually.

Why the General and Operations Manager median looks low

General and Operations Managers is the largest VP/Director-equivalent SOC code BLS tracks, covering roughly 3.7 million workers nationally in 2024. That scale is the problem. SOC 11-1021 sweeps in everything from a store manager at a regional retailer to the COO of a $2 billion manufacturer. The median of $102,950 reflects that enormous range — it is not a VP benchmark. It is a benchmark for every person whose employer checked the box marked “manages overall operations.”

For the purposes of salary benchmarking at the $150k+ level, General and Operations Managers at the 75th percentile and above is a more defensible comparison point. BLS reports that the 90th percentile for this occupation exceeds the $239,200 top-code, confirming the upper tier does operate in VP-equivalent territory. The median, however, should not anchor any VP-level negotiation.

The industry split: where the same title pays very differently

Financial Managers illustrate the industry gap more cleanly than any other management occupation. BLS OEWS industry-specific data for May 2024 shows the annual mean base salary for Financial Managers in the Securities, Commodity Contracts, and Other Financial Investments sector at $206,050 — versus $124,040 in Credit Intermediation. An $82,000 spread in mean base salary for the same SOC code, across two industries that both claim the title “Financial Manager.” A VP of Finance at a hedge fund and a VP of Finance at a regional bank are indistinguishable in BLS data. They are not the same job.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics OEWS, May 2024 national industry-specific estimates, SOC 11-3031. Annual mean wage reflects straight-time gross pay only; excludes bonuses, equity, and nonproduction pay.

Marketing Managers show the same pattern. The market rate for a Marketing Director in tech or professional services skews well above the $161,030 national median, while the same title in retail or hospitality frequently falls below it. BLS OEWS custom tables are required to pull industry-specific mean wages for Marketing Managers with precision, but the directional evidence is consistent: industry is the primary driver of where within the distribution a VP or Director title actually lands.

For finance salary benchmarks across the full $150k to $500k range, the industry and company-size variables compound each other. A VP at a large public company earns structurally differently from a VP at a private equity-backed mid-market firm, even within the same sector.

Geography: the MSA premium at the VP level

Across the metropolitan statistical areas reporting General and Operations Manager data in OEWS, median wages span from approximately $76,000 to $164,000 — more than an $88,000 range for the same SOC code. For Financial Managers and Marketing Managers, the geographic spread is similarly wide, with high-density financial and tech metros driving mean wages that substantially exceed the national figures.

For remote workers navigating geographic pay differences, this spread is directly relevant. Companies that pay on a location-adjusted basis anchor to the MSA median for the employee’s location, not the national figure. A VP of Marketing relocating from San Francisco to Austin may face a base salary adjustment even if the role stays identical. Whether that adjustment is appropriate depends on whether the employer uses a cost-of-living factor or a pure market rate factor — two methodologically different approaches that produce meaningfully different outcomes.

The BLS OEWS MSA data, accessible through the occupation profile tool at data.bls.gov/oesprofile/, is the right starting point for establishing a geography-specific baseline. The process for reading BLS salary data to establish your MSA-specific position requires pulling the occupation table for your metropolitan area, not relying on the national median.

Total compensation: what BLS does not capture

OEWS wages include base salary, guaranteed pay, and production bonuses. They exclude target bonuses, equity grants, profit-sharing, and employer benefit contributions. For VP and Director-level roles, those excluded components can represent 30% to more than 100% of base salary depending on industry and company stage.

Directional benchmark data from the Betts Recruiting 2024 Executive Compensation Guide — a secondary source covering tech startup compensation specifically, which should be treated as an upper bound for that sector rather than a cross-industry average — shows target bonus rates at the VP level running 20–30% of base in finance roles and approximately 20% in marketing. VP of Sales positions frequently operate on on-target earnings structures where variable pay dominates. For consulting roles, target bonus structures vary sharply by firm tier and level in ways not captured by BLS.

Base salary: BLS OOH, May 2024 (SOC 11-3031, 11-2021, 11-3121). Target bonus ranges: Betts Recruiting 2024 Executive Compensation Guide — tech startup data only, directional. Employer health insurance: KFF 2024 Employer Health Benefits Survey, employer average contribution toward family coverage. Equity not modeled due to high variance. This table is illustrative; it is not a compensation survey estimate.

The equity component is where this model is most incomplete. For VP-level RSU grants at large public tech companies, annualized equity value frequently exceeds base salary. A VP of Engineering at a large-cap technology firm may receive $200,000–$400,000 in annualized equity grant value on top of a base that BLS classifies in the Financial or Marketing Manager range. This is precisely why comparing total compensation rather than base salary alone matters most at this level.

The gap between tech and non-tech compensation at the same management level widens significantly once equity is factored in. A VP at a technology company and a VP at a healthcare system may report similar base salaries, but their total compensation packages can differ by $150,000 or more annually when equity grants are annualized and included.

Finluxy Compensation Percentile: positioning your package

The Finluxy Compensation Percentile places a stated total compensation package within the BLS wage distribution for the same occupation and metropolitan statistical area, expressed separately for base salary and for estimated total compensation where data allows.

Three worked examples using BLS OEWS May 2024 data:

BLS OEWS May 2024 medians used as 50th percentile anchor. Percentile estimates are approximations derived from published 10th and 90th percentile anchors where available; exact positioning requires the full OEWS wage distribution. MSA-specific Finluxy Compensation Percentile requires pulling the metropolitan area table from data.bls.gov/oesprofile/. Total compensation percentile is not calculable from OEWS alone given excluded components.

For product management roles, which frequently occupy a Director or Senior Director band, the same percentile logic applies — the relevant SOC code median is the anchor, but company size, industry, and MSA each move the distribution materially.

The overlooked signal in this dataset

Most coverage of management salary data focuses on the median. The more useful signal for VP and Director benchmarking is the ratio between the 10th percentile and the median. For Financial Managers, that gap is $75,210 — from $86,490 to $161,700. For Marketing Managers, it is $79,130. Both gaps are unusually large in absolute dollar terms relative to the overall population of occupations BLS tracks.

What that asymmetry reveals: the bottom of the Financial Manager and Marketing Manager distributions is populated by workers with the same SOC code but structurally different jobs — smaller companies, lower-complexity roles, non-coastal geography, earlier career stage. A VP or Director at a company with more than 500 employees in a major MSA should benchmark above the median by default, not at it. The national median for these occupations includes a substantial population of workers who do not share your organizational context. Anchoring a raise request to the cross-industry median is leaving negotiating leverage on the table.

This also applies in reverse. If your base salary is near or below the 10th percentile for your SOC code, the issue may not be the national market — it may be your specific employer’s pay band, your industry, or your geography. Disaggregating which of those three variables is driving the gap is the prerequisite to any productive negotiation. The city-by-city percentile data available for software engineering roles illustrates this principle clearly, and the same approach applies to management occupations using the OEWS MSA tables.

The $150k+ household context

At the VP or Director level, base salary in the ranges documented here starts to make income planning substantively more complex. Target bonuses and equity grants layer on timing and tax character decisions that do not arise at lower compensation levels. More immediately: a VP of Finance earning $165,000 base in New York City is below the Financial Managers mean for the securities sector ($206,050). A VP of Marketing earning $165,000 in Austin, Texas is likely well above the local MSA median for that occupation. The same base salary can represent a materially different market position depending on sector and geography.

Income growth trajectories at the VP and Director level also diverge sharply by industry over a 10-year window. Technology and finance management roles have historically shown faster wage growth than comparable levels in healthcare administration or manufacturing management, largely because equity and variable pay components grow with company valuation and performance in ways that fixed-pay-heavy sectors do not replicate. Whether that gap persists as companies restructure management layers is an open question, but the starting point for any negotiation should reflect your specific industry percentile position — not a cross-industry national median that includes the full range of company sizes, geographies, and sectors.

The BLS figures in this article represent base salary of wage and salary workers. They do not capture equity grants that increasingly define total compensation at this level. Treat the BLS median as a baseline for the cash component and benchmark any equity grant separately against sector-specific data. For tech roles, Levels.fyi provides self-reported equity data with the important caveat that it skews toward senior roles at large, well-known companies. The numbers are directional, not definitive, but more granular than anything BLS publishes on nonproduction pay. Understanding the full picture requires knowing how compensation components compound across the range from $100k to $150k and above — and then applying that framework to the VP-level structure where base, bonus, and equity each carry distinct weight in the overall package. For households where income at this tier triggers meaningful changes in tax position, the timing of variable pay and equity vesting matters as much as the gross total. That is a conversation that belongs in the context of the full compensation picture, not just the base salary benchmark.