Case Manager Salary in New York 2026,
$73,070 Median | BLS Data by City

The published New York figure is $73,070 a year, or $35.13 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $47,750 at the 10th percentile to $103,730 at the 90th and quartiles at $57,630 and $91,950. That is 7.6% above the national median of $67,880. The row is SOC 21-1022, Healthcare Social Workers — broader than the case-manager title, and it excludes case managers who are registered nurses.

New York-Newark-Jersey City at $78,610, then Kingston $75,300, Kiryas Joel-Poughkeepsie-Newburgh $71,630, Albany-Schenectady-Troy $67,190 and Buffalo-Cheektowaga $64,940. The spread of about nineteen percent is narrow for New York, which is what you would expect from an occupation funded largely through Medicaid and health-plan budgets rather than through local market wages.

There is no case-manager licence, but there is usually a social work one. The State Education Department's Office of the Professions licenses the LMSW after a master's degree from a registered programme plus the licensing examination, and the LCSW after additional supervised clinical experience. Since the wage row here is Healthcare Social Workers, most posts described by these figures require one of those. Nurse case managers work under the New York registered nurse licence instead and are counted on a different SOC row.

No. The Certified Case Manager credential is issued by a private commission and carries no legal effect in New York. Some health plans and hospital systems prefer or reimburse it, and it can help in a competitive internal promotion, but it is not a substitute for the LMSW or LCSW where the post is a social work post, and it does not appear as a distinct tier in the published wage band.

Because of how the state pays for care. New York's Medicaid programme is unusually large relative to its population, and its managed long-term care and home and community-based service programmes are structured around assessment, care planning and coordination — work that is done by people counted on this row. A location quotient of 1.75 across 20,440 jobs is the measurable result. It also means the occupation's stability in this state is tied to state budget decisions in a way that private-sector occupations are not.

It is a fork in both the credential and the data. A social work case manager holds an LMSW or LCSW from the Office of the Professions and is counted here, on SOC 21-1022, with a $73,070 median. A nurse case manager holds a New York registered nurse licence and is counted on the registered nurse row, which publishes a materially higher figure in this state. The jobs overlap heavily in day-to-day content — utilisation review, discharge planning, benefit navigation — but they are separate licensure paths with separate wage ladders, and a candidate choosing between them is choosing between two multi-year educational commitments, not between two job titles.

Wider than the metro table suggests. The interquartile range runs from $57,630 to $91,950, and setting explains most of it: community agencies and non-profits funded on contract sit toward the bottom, hospital systems in the middle, and health plans and managed long-term care organisations toward the top. Because the metro spread is under twenty percent while the interquartile spread is nearer sixty, an upstate move into a health plan will do more for a New York case manager's earnings than a downstate move within the same sector.

That the 7.7% national projection understates New York's exposure to policy. About 2,000 openings a year is the pro-rated share, but New York's demand for this occupation is generated by specific state programmes rather than by general healthcare growth. Expansions of managed long-term care and of home and community-based services create posts directly; a rate cut or a programme redesign removes them just as directly. That is a different risk profile from a hospital clinical role, and it argues for holding the LCSW — which is portable across settings — rather than specialising narrowly in one programme's rules.