Construction Project Manager Salary in New York 2026,
$155,360 Median | BLS Data by City

The published New York figure is $155,360 a year, or $74.69 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $86,250 at the 10th percentile to $244,590 at the 90th and quartiles at $108,890 and $197,010. That is 35.1% above the national median of $114,990. The row is SOC 11-9021, Construction Managers, which is broader than the project manager title and also captures owners and senior operations roles.

New York-Newark-Jersey City at $158,000, then Kiryas Joel-Poughkeepsie-Newburgh $152,100, Rochester $134,940, Syracuse $132,760 and Albany-Schenectady-Troy $130,980. Every one of those is above the national median, which is unusual — in most New York occupations the upstate metros sit at or below the national figure. Here the whole state is a premium market and the city is a premium within it.

Not from the state. New York does not license construction management, and there is no state examination or registration. The requirements that bite are local and site-specific: New York City's Local Law 196 Site Safety Training cards, Department of Buildings registration for site safety managers and coordinators on larger jobs, and DCWP licensing for home improvement contractors. General contractor licensing elsewhere in the state is county or city administered. The OSHA 30 card and the SST card are what a New York City employer will actually ask to see.

The location quotient of 0.43 on 10,280 jobs says exactly that, and the most consistent explanation is project scale. New York construction is concentrated in large, complex, high-value projects run by comparatively small management teams, rather than distributed across a large volume of small jobs each with its own manager. That structure both reduces the headcount and raises the value of each role — which is why a state with under half the national density of construction managers pays the highest median among its peer group.

New York's $155,360 leads its peer group narrowly over Washington at $155,070, then Massachusetts $145,010, Alaska $139,190, New Jersey $138,230 and California $133,160. The gap over New Jersey is worth noting for anyone working the metropolitan market: the same projects can be managed from either side of the line, and New Jersey publishes about eleven percent less on this row while New York City residents additionally pay 3.078% to 3.876% city income tax.

Nothing about credentialing, and everything about what the job carries. Building in New York City means navigating Department of Buildings permitting, Local Law 196 site safety training compliance, union labour agreements, extreme site constraints and, increasingly, the building emissions retrofit regime. A manager who can run a project through that is scarce in a way that has nothing to do with a certificate, and the market prices the scarcity directly. The peer-state table supports the reading: the states clustered near New York — Washington $155,070, Massachusetts $145,010 — are the other markets with dense urban construction and heavy regulatory overlay.

As a scope ladder rather than a tenure one. The bottom quartile is assistant project managers and project engineers, most of whom will pass through it in a few years. The median at $155,360 is a manager owning a project. The 75th at $197,010 is someone carrying several projects or one very large one with commercial exposure attached, and the 90th at $244,590 is portfolio and business-development responsibility. Because SOC 11-9021 also contains construction business owners, the very top of the band includes people whose earnings are partly a return on a business rather than a salary.

The 8.7% national growth projection is among the highest in this unit, but the pro-rated New York figure of about 1,260 openings a year is constrained by the state's small 2.7% share of national employment on the row. The more useful signal is the composition of New York's pipeline: transit and infrastructure programmes running over many years, a multifamily development cycle tied to state and city housing policy, and a large mandated retrofit market created by New York City's building emissions rules. Those are multi-year, management-intensive workstreams, and they favour managers with compliance-heavy experience over those with pure new-build backgrounds.