CMO Salary 2026,
What CMOs Actually Earn

How much do cmos make in 2026?

Chief marketing officers are counted in the BLS marketing managers series, which is the only place the government measures them: OEWS May 2025 gives the SOC 11-2021 national median as $166,790 a year ($80.19 an hour), with the 75th percentile at $216,410 and the top 10% at $293,610. That median is not a CMO figure and should never be quoted as one. The series pools first-line marketing managers with directors and executives, so a chief marketing officer belongs against the 75th and 90th percentile figures at minimum. Two further caveats push real CMO compensation above even the top decile. First, OEWS is a wage-only survey: it captures base salary and bonus paid through payroll but excludes equity, and at venture-backed and public companies equity typically forms the largest single component of an executive marketing package. Second, the survey's top percentile is a threshold rather than a ceiling, so it tells you where the top 10% begins and nothing about how far above it executives at large companies sit. What determines an actual CMO package is company scale, ownership structure and whether the role owns revenue as well as marketing: a fractional CMO at a small business, a venture-stage CMO with meaningful equity and a public-company CMO occupy different worlds. Employment across the series is projected to grow 6.6% through 2034 with roughly 34,300 openings a year. → Full cmo career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $166,790 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 11-2021, 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.

Full site methodology & data sources →