Account Executive Salary 2026,
What Account Executives Actually Earn

How much do account executives make in 2026?

Account executives are counted in the BLS services sales representative series: OEWS May 2025 gives the SOC 41-3091 national median as $69,990 a year ($33.65 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $37,980 and the top 10% at $148,840. Two things about that figure matter more than the figure itself. First, the OEWS wage measure includes commission and bonus paid through payroll, so the median already blends base and variable pay — but it excludes equity, which is a material part of total compensation in venture-backed software and is invisible in every government wage series. Second, it is a median of actual earnings, not of on-target earnings. A typical account executive plan runs a 50/50 or 60/40 base-to-variable split, so an AE on a $140,000 on-target package is carrying roughly $70,000 to $84,000 of guaranteed base and has to sell the rest. Attainment across a normal sales team is not evenly distributed: a minority of reps clear quota, the median rep lands somewhere short of it, and the OEWS median reflects that reality rather than the OTE printed in the offer letter. Segment drives the rest. Transactional small-business selling with short cycles sits in the lower half of the band, mid-market in the middle, and enterprise or strategic selling with multi-quarter cycles and six-figure deal sizes sits at the top. Employment is projected to grow 3.1% through 2034 with roughly 123,000 openings a year. → Full account executive career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $69,990 blends every experience level and every setting in this occupation. For pay by level alone, see Pay by Level below.

Published (BLS): BLS OEWS May 2025, SOC 41-3091, United States national estimate. Public, methodologically rigorous, but sampled on a rolling 3-year basis and published ~10 months after collection — so it reflects wages that are already 1–2 years old by the time you read them.

Level and certification medians: distributed across the published BLS percentile range for this SOC code (P10 through P90) according to the credential tiers this occupation actually hires at. They are modeled reference points, not separately surveyed wages.

State and metro figures: modeled — the BLS national median multiplied by the GlobalCybers state wage index, and for metros by the published metro index for that state. They are estimates of local pay, not BLS state or metropolitan-area observations, and are labelled as modeled in the tables below.

No verified placement sample:GlobalCybers does not yet publish a placement median for this role, so no "verified" figure appears anywhere on this page.

Full site methodology & data sources →