Account Executive Salary in New York 2026,
$92,190 Median | BLS Data by City

The published New York figure is $92,190 a year, or $44.32 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $45,750 at the 10th percentile to $174,820 at the 90th and quartiles at $61,340 and $133,580. That is 31.7% above the national median of $69,990. The row is SOC 41-3091, Sales Representatives of Services, which explicitly excludes advertising, insurance, financial services and travel sales.

New York-Newark-Jersey City at $93,750 by a wide margin, then Buffalo-Cheektowaga $73,070, Kingston $71,220, Kiryas Joel-Poughkeepsie-Newburgh $70,310 and Albany-Schenectady-Troy $68,050. The four upstate metros all sit close to the national median of $69,990. Effectively all of New York's premium in this occupation is a New York City premium.

Yes. OEWS annual wages include incentive pay such as commissions and production bonuses, which is precisely why this band is so wide — $45,750 at the 10th percentile against $174,820 at the 90th. It does not include employer benefit contributions, and it is a snapshot of a single reference period, so an account executive's own year-to-year variation can exceed the difference between two adjacent percentiles on this ladder.

Not for the sales work counted on this row. New York does not license general commercial sales. Two adjacent fields do require credentials and are deliberately excluded from this SOC code: insurance sales requires a producer licence from the New York State Department of Financial Services, and securities sales requires FINRA registration through a broker-dealer. If you are selling either of those, this page's figures do not describe your market.

Only if the destination is downstate. New York-Newark-Jersey City's $93,750 is a genuine premium; Albany-Schenectady-Troy's $68,050 is below the national median of $69,990. And the downstate move carries the city income tax of 3.078% to 3.876% on top of a state rate reaching 10.9%, applied to commission income at the marginal rate. The relocation case rests on deal size and account quality — the reason the $133,580 seventy-fifth percentile is reachable at all — rather than on the headline state median.

Account concentration, not wage-setting. The compensation structure for this occupation is broadly national — base plus variable against quota — so the state premium is mostly a statement about the size of the deals available. New York City is where the largest buyers of software, staffing, logistics and professional services in the eastern United States sit, and quota attainment against larger contracts produces larger commission. That interpretation is confirmed by the metro table: strip out New York-Newark-Jersey City's $93,750 and the remaining four metros, from $73,070 down to $68,050, describe an ordinary American sales market.

Split it. The 10th and 25th percentiles, $45,750 and $61,340, describe base-heavy junior packages and under-attainment. The median of $92,190 is roughly what a quota-carrying account executive earns in an ordinary year. The 75th at $133,580 and the 90th at $174,820 describe enterprise deal sizes and over-attainment. Because OEWS counts realised earnings rather than on-target earnings, a package quoted as an OTE is not directly comparable to any of these numbers — the percentile ladder already has the misses in it.

That New York employs account executives at almost exactly the national rate for its size — 80,510 of them. That is a useful corrective to the premium: this is not a state that is unusually full of sales roles, it is a state where a normal density of sales roles are attached to unusually large accounts. It also means the market is competitive on the supply side; the 80,510 figure includes everyone chasing the same downstate territories, and the $45,750 tenth percentile is evidence that not all of them are clearing quota.