CFO Salary in Illinois 2026,
$165,880 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Illinois median for financial managers is $165,880 a year, $79.75 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with the middle half between $128,370 and $216,800 and a full range of $100,070 to $313,110. BLS publishes no CFO-only wage row, so treat the chief financial officer tier as sitting at and above the $216,800 seventy-fifth percentile rather than at the median.

Chicago-Naperville-Elgin at $168,810, then Bloomington at $156,240, Peoria at $155,840, Rockford at $135,650 and Springfield at $133,530. Bloomington and Peoria running within thirteen thousand dollars of Chicago is a corporate-headquarters effect — those metros host finance organisations sized for national businesses.

No, but it is the most common credential. Illinois licenses no one as a CFO; what employers screen on is the Illinois CPA licence, the CFA charter where the business is investment-heavy, or an MBA plus a controller and treasury track record. Illinois is unusual in splitting the CPA credential between two bodies — the Illinois Board of Examiners for the certificate and IDFPR for the licence to practise.

Because that is the only wage row BLS publishes for this population. SOC 11-3031 covers controllers, treasurers, finance directors and chief financial officers together, and in Illinois that means about 52,720 people, the overwhelming majority of whom are not CFOs. Every figure on this page describes that whole group; the CFO tier is the top of it.

More than to most occupations, because senior finance pay is so incentive-weighted. Illinois applies 4.95% to every dollar, so an annual bonus or a vesting equity tranche is taxed at the same state rate as base salary — no bracket creep, no recalculation. Combined with the absence of any Illinois municipal wage tax, that makes Chicago a cleaner net-pay comparison than several competing headquarters markets.

Because finance is a headquarters function and Illinois hosts an unusual number of headquarters relative to its size — insurers, exchanges and clearing organisations, heavy equipment, agricultural processing, consumer goods and a large private equity market with portfolio company finance teams. A location quotient of 1.60 across 52,720 people is the measurable result, and it is also why Bloomington and Peoria pay near Chicago rates in this occupation.

It is a category median for a job family, not a rate for a job. The distance between an FP&A manager near the $100,070 tenth percentile and a public-company CFO is enormous, and at the very top the OEWS wage measure stops being informative at all, because public-company CFO compensation is dominated by equity that this survey does not capture. Use the $216,800 seventy-fifth percentile as the reference for genuine CFO-level roles at mid-market Illinois companies.

It creates a distinct, faster track. Chicago's middle-market private equity firms install and replace portfolio-company CFOs on short cycles, pay for a specific skill set — lender reporting, integration accounting, exit readiness — and attach equity to the seat. That route reaches the Illinois 90th percentile of $313,110 in wage terms much faster than a corporate ladder does, at the cost of tenure security, and it is a genuinely distinctive feature of this state's finance market.