Grocery Department Manager Salary 2026,
What Grocery Department Managers Actually Earn

How much do grocery department managers make in 2026?

Grocery department managers are counted in the BLS first-line supervisors of retail sales workers series: OEWS May 2025 puts the SOC 41-1011 national median at $48,520 a year ($23.33 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $33,120 and the top 10% at $77,080. Department management within grocery sits around the middle of that band, but the department itself makes a substantial difference. Dry grocery and general merchandise departments are largely replenishment operations with centralised ordering, and they sit lower. Fresh departments are production operations: meat and seafood departments require cutting skill and strict handling standards, bakery and deli departments plan and execute daily production with waste consequences, and produce departments manage the shortest shelf life in the store. Those roles pay above dry grocery and are consistently harder to staff, particularly meat departments where skilled cutters have become scarce as centralised case-ready processing reduced the training pipeline. Food safety responsibility formalises the difference, since managers of these departments typically hold certification and carry personal accountability for compliance. Progression from a fresh department to assistant store manager is a well-trodden route, precisely because running a production department teaches labour, waste and margin management simultaneously. Employment is projected to change by -5% through 2034 with roughly 125,100 openings a year. → Full grocery department manager career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $48,520 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 41-1011, 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.

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