Head Chef Salary 2026,
What Head Chefs Actually Earn

How much do head chefs make in 2026?

Head chefs are counted in the BLS chefs and head cooks series: OEWS May 2025 gives SOC 35-1011 a national median of $62,470 a year ($30.03 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $37,900 and the top 10% at $98,560. The series pools head chefs with executive chefs, sous chefs and head cooks, so it describes kitchen leadership as a whole. The first thing to resolve is the title itself. In a single-restaurant operation, head chef and executive chef often mean the same job — the person who runs the kitchen, writes the menu and owns food cost. In a larger property with several outlets, head chef usually means the person running one kitchen, reporting to an executive chef who oversees all of them. Those are different jobs with different pay, and the same title covers both. Where a head chef sits in this band therefore depends on which structure they are in, alongside the operation's volume and price point. What consistently moves pay upward is commercial capability rather than cooking ability alone: head chefs who control food cost, manage purchasing well, schedule to demand and retain their team are worth substantially more than equally talented cooks who cannot. Employment is projected to grow 7.1% through 2034 with roughly 24,400 openings a year. → Full head chef career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $62,470 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 35-1011, 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 →