Parts Manager Salary 2026,
What Parts Managers Actually Earn

How much do parts managers make in 2026?

Parts managers are counted in the BLS first-line supervisors of retail sales workers series: OEWS May 2025 gives SOC 41-1011 a national median of $48,520 a year ($23.33 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $33,120 and the top 10% at $77,080 across 1,121,800 workers. That is a very large general retail supervision code shared with several published records on this site, and parts managers at dealerships typically sit above its median because the role carries inventory and margin responsibility that a shop floor supervisor does not. The core of the job is capital management. A dealership parts department holds a substantial inventory investment, and the parts manager decides what to stock, at what depth, against a service department that wants everything available immediately and an owner who does not want money sitting on shelves. Obsolescence is the measure of failure: parts bought and never sold are a direct loss, and manufacturer return allowances only cover part of it. Good parts managers run tight turns, high fill rates and low obsolescence simultaneously, and grow the wholesale business to increase throughput. The honest outlook matters here — BLS projects the pooled retail supervisor code to decline 5% by 2034 — though dealership parts management is more insulated than general retail supervision. Roughly 125,100 openings a year arise across the pooled code. → Full parts 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 →