Grocery Manager Salary 2026,
What Grocery Managers Actually Earn

How much do grocery managers make in 2026?

Grocery managers are counted in the BLS first-line supervisors of retail sales workers series: OEWS May 2025 gives the SOC 41-1011 national median as $48,520 a year ($23.33 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $33,120 and the top 10% at $77,080. Grocery management sits in the upper half of that band at store level, because supermarket operations are among the most demanding in retail. The store trades seven days across long hours, handles perishable stock with genuine waste consequences, operates production departments — bakery, deli, prepared food, butchery — with food safety obligations, employs a large and heavily part-time workforce, and runs on margins thinner than almost any other retail format. Position within the band follows store volume above all, and supermarket volumes vary enormously. Fresh and prepared food capability is the other clear lever: as grocers have competed on meals and freshness rather than on packaged goods, managers who can run production departments with controlled waste and consistent quality have become more valuable. Unionised grocery markets add a further dimension, with negotiated scales and benefit structures that a wage figure does not capture. The occupation as a whole carries a projected decline, which reflects store closures across retail rather than grocery specifically. Employment is projected to change by -5% through 2034 with roughly 125,100 openings a year. → Full grocery 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.

Full site methodology & data sources →