MBA salary

MBA Salary By Occupation

An MBA salary is not a figure any federal survey publishes. Two sources come close, and they answer different questions. College Scorecard reports what a school's business master's graduates earned after finishing, which is what the rankings on this site use. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports what each occupation pays, whatever degree the worker holds. Read together, they show both what graduates of a given program earn and what the jobs they move into pay across the country.

MBA Salary Figures For 13 Occupations

Median annual pay from the BLS May 2025 release, with the 10th and 90th percentiles, for the occupations MBA graduates commonly move into. Where a concentration on this site points toward an occupation, it is named.

MBA Salary By Job Family: What MBA Jobs Pay

The same occupations, grouped the way a reader choosing a concentration would group them. Each figure is an occupation median, which is the closest thing to an MBA salary the federal data holds: these jobs are held by people with the degree and without it.

MBA Salary After An Online MBA

The figures above describe jobs. College Scorecard describes people: what a school's business master's graduates earned after finishing. Across the 286 ranked online MBAs, the middle half of schools sits between $70,617 and $99,097 a year out, with a median of $80,912. 66 schools report a median above $100,000, and the range runs from $40,079 to $165,798.

Earnings rise with time out of the program. For the 271 schools Scorecard reports at both points, the median goes from $81,168 one year after finishing to $106,939 four years after, a gain of $25,771. The highest year-one figures belong to Carnegie Mellon University ($165,798), The University of Michigan ($160,286), The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ($156,818), Rice University ($150,476), Babson College ($145,036).

These are medians for graduates who received federal aid, and they reflect who enrolls as much as what a program teaches: a school that admits experienced managers reports high earnings whatever it adds. The methodology sets out what the figure counts and what it leaves out.

Is An Online MBA Worth It?

Three numbers frame the question. The median ranked program reports $32,265 in whole-program tuition. Its graduates carry a median $33,500 in federal loans, across the 253 schools Scorecard reports debt for. They earned a median $80,912 a year after finishing and $106,939 four years after.

What none of that establishes is cause. No federal source reports what the same people would have earned without the degree, so the distance between tuition and earnings is not a return on the money. It does bound the question: the cheapest ranked program costs $9,000, under a quarter of the median year-one figure, and the price list shows how far that floor reaches.

What Managers Earn By State

Pay for general and operations managers varies more by state than by most other factors a reader controls. The highest medians are in New Jersey ($173,690), District of Columbia ($168,000), South Dakota ($137,400); the lowest are in Arkansas ($74,050), Missouri ($79,300), Kentucky ($79,370). For the states with their own online MBA ranking:

Common Questions About MBA Salary

Sources For These MBA Salary Figures

• Accreditation, online MBA offerings, concentrations and tuition: AACSB's list of accredited schools, retrieved September 21, 2026. Program details on that list are reported to AACSB by each school.
• Graduate earnings and debt: U.S. Department of Education, College Scorecard, field-of-study file (Most-Recent-Cohorts-Field-of-Study_06102026.zip), business master's in CIP 52.01 and 52.02.
• Institution identifiers: IPEDS, used to match each AACSB school to its federal records.
• Wages: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025.