Executive Assistant Salary in California 2026,
$89,000 Median | BLS Data by City

The published California figure is $89,000 a year, or $42.79 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $58,060 at the 10th percentile to $130,510 at the 90th and quartiles at $72,110 and $107,090. That is 16.2% above the national median of $76,590. The row is SOC 43-6011, Executive Secretaries and Executive Administrative Assistants — an exact match, and one of the specialisms excluded from the general administrative assistant code.

San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara at $106,220, then San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont $105,190, Santa Rosa-Petaluma $92,240, Sacramento-Roseville-Folsom $87,910 and Vallejo $86,190. The Bay Area pair sit close to the statewide 75th percentile of $107,090, which is a much stronger geographic effect than the general administrative row shows — executive support follows executives, and California's executives are concentrated.

The gap is large and it is the main reason this page exists separately. The general administrative row, SOC 43-6014, explicitly excludes executive secretaries, and California's median on that row is far below the $89,000 published here. The two jobs differ in what they actually involve: general administrative work is calendar and document processing, which automates; executive support is judgement about time, access and priorities on behalf of a senior decision-maker, which does not.

It depends on the position, not the title. California's exempt classification requires both a duties test and a salary threshold tied to the state minimum wage, which is higher than the federal threshold. Some executive assistant roles meet it and some do not, and misclassification is a live issue in the state. A candidate should establish the classification before accepting, because a non-exempt role carries California's daily overtime rule after eight hours and its meal and rest period premiums, which are worth real money.

The $107,090 seventy-fifth percentile and $130,510 ninetieth are supporting C-level executives at scaled employers, coordinating boards, and in many cases holding responsibilities that extend into executive operations or a chief of staff function. There is no credential involved — California licenses nothing here — so the qualification is a record of trusted work at increasing seniority, and the Bay Area's concentration of large employers is why both leading metros publish so close to that upper territory.

Because the two jobs are different in kind, not degree. Calendar scheduling, expense processing and document formatting are rule-following tasks and software now does them well, which is why the general administrative occupation's national projection is negative and California's location quotient on that row is 0.79. Executive support is largely the exercise of delegated judgement: who gets access, what gets escalated, what an executive should be prepared for, what can be declined on their behalf. That requires context, relationships and discretion that no workflow tool provides. The 1.11 location quotient here against 0.79 there is the same distinction measured in headcount.

Stronger than in general administrative work and weaker than in technology roles. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara at $106,220 and San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont at $105,190 are well above Sacramento-Roseville-Folsom at $87,910 and Vallejo at $86,190, and both sit near the statewide upper quartile. The reason is straightforward: executive support is priced against the seniority of the executive supported, and the Bay Area has an unusual density of large-company senior leadership. The corollary is that the route to the top of this band runs through employer scale rather than through geography as such — a chief executive's assistant at a large Sacramento employer may out-earn a director's assistant in San Jose.

SOC 43-6011 is an exact match, so composition is not the problem. What the code does not capture is the growing overlap between senior executive assistant roles and chief of staff or executive operations positions, which are frequently classified into management or business operations codes instead. That means the $130,510 ninetieth percentile may understate what the most senior people doing this kind of work in California actually earn, because the best-compensated among them have been retitled off this row entirely. A candidate at the top of this band should be looking at those adjacent titles rather than assuming this ceiling is theirs.