CFO Salary in Los Angeles, CA 2026,
$175,310 Median | BLS + Market Data

The BLS median for financial managers across the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metro is $175,310/yr, or $84.28 an hour, with a published band from $102,360 to $337,680 — 5.2% above the US median. That row covers 34,480 people including controllers and finance directors, so a chief financial officer at a substantial employer sits at or beyond the top of this band rather than near its middle.

Marginally below — the metro sits 3.0% under the California statewide figure, which is lifted by Bay Area technology finance compensation. Among peer metros Los Angeles sits above San Diego at $174,210, Charlotte at $172,760, Atlanta at $171,240, Dallas at $169,200 and Chicago at $168,810.

Everyone who directs financial activities for an organisation or a unit of one: controllers, treasurers, credit managers, finance directors, divisional finance leads and chief financial officers. That is why the count here is 34,480 rather than a few hundred. For anyone benchmarking a CFO role, the consequence is that this median is a controller-and-director figure, and even the $337,680 at the 90th percentile describes the wage portion of senior finance pay rather than a total package at a large public company.

Entertainment and media, where studio and streaming finance functions handle content amortisation, participations and residuals that exist nowhere else; aerospace and defence, with programme accounting and government contract compliance; and the region's investment management and private capital community. Ports and logistics, healthcare systems and consumer brands make up the broad middle. That mix is unusual, and it means finance careers here can be genuinely specialised.

Common but not required. Finance chiefs arriving through controllership almost always hold the CPA licence, issued in this state by the California Board of Accountancy. Those arriving through financial planning, treasury, investment banking or corporate development frequently hold an MBA or CFA charter instead. No state licence governs the CFO title itself, and no examination is required to hold it.

OEWS collects wages and salaries from employer payroll records. That works well for controllers and finance directors, whose compensation is predominantly salary and cash bonus, and progressively less well as seniority rises. At chief financial officer level in a public company, restricted stock, performance share units and long-term incentives typically exceed base salary and appear nowhere here. This page is an accurate description of the broad financial management market and a floor — not an estimate — for genuine CFO compensation. Proxy disclosures are the right source for the latter.

Studio and streaming finance involves accounting problems that exist almost nowhere else: capitalising and amortising content over uncertain revenue lives, calculating profit participations and residuals under contracts negotiated decades ago, managing production financing and tax incentives across jurisdictions. Finance professionals who understand it are scarce and largely concentrated in this metro. It is the clearest example of how an industry cluster creates a specialised finance labour market inside a general occupation.

A 14.8% national growth projection is remarkable for a management occupation. It reflects the expansion of what finance functions are expected to do: regulatory and reporting complexity has increased, planning has become data-intensive, risk management has widened, and private capital ownership has multiplied the number of companies needing full finance leadership. All four drivers apply in this metro, and the roughly 3,060 openings a year pro-rated here is one of the larger figures on this site for a senior role.