Assistant Store Manager Salary 2026,
What Assistant Store Managers Actually Earn

How much do assistant store managers make in 2026?

Assistant store managers are counted in the BLS first-line supervisors of retail sales workers series: OEWS May 2025 puts the SOC 41-1011 national median at $48,520 a year ($23.33 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $33,120 and the top 10% at $77,080. Assistant managers typically sit around and below that midpoint, since the same series contains full store managers running large-volume sites. The role is the operational deputy: running shifts, opening and closing, supervising departments, handling staffing and scheduling execution, managing stock and deliveries, resolving customer escalations and covering the store manager's absence. One practical issue deserves attention before accepting any assistant manager offer, and it is the source of persistent disputes in retail: exempt classification. If the position is salaried and exempt, long hours during peak trading are not separately paid, and where the role in practice consists largely of the same work hourly staff perform, the exemption may not be correctly applied. Comparing the salary against the hours actually worked — and against what a senior hourly associate earns with overtime — is a legitimate and worthwhile calculation. Progression to store manager is the main economic reason to take the role, and how quickly a retailer promotes internally is worth asking about directly. Employment is projected to change by -5% through 2034 with roughly 125,100 openings a year. → Full assistant store manager career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $48,520 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 41-1011, 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.

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