Production Manager Salary in Illinois 2026,
$127,270 Median | BLS Data by City

Illinois industrial production managers earn a median $127,270 a year, $61.19 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with the middle half between $101,990 and $162,070 and a full range of $82,900 to $205,310. That is 1.0% above the $126,060 national median, and the code covers plant and operations managers alongside people holding the production manager title.

Decatur at $132,250, then Chicago-Naperville-Elgin at $129,840, Peoria at $129,500, Kankakee at $124,070 and Champaign-Urbana at $122,600. Under ten thousand dollars separates the whole table, which makes Illinois one of the flattest states in the country for this occupation — plant scale matters far more than metro.

No state licence exists and IDFPR regulates nothing here. Employers screen on lean manufacturing and Six Sigma belts, on APICS/ASCM certifications such as the CPIM, and above all on regulatory competence — OSHA process safety management, FDA and USDA food-safety compliance, and Illinois EPA permitting, depending on the sector.

Four dominate. Agricultural processing and food manufacturing, which is why Decatur tops the table; heavy equipment and machinery around Peoria and Rockford; chemicals and refining along the state's industrial corridors; and a diverse Chicago-area base of food, packaging, plastics and metal fabrication. Each brings its own regulatory regime, and moving between them is harder than the shared job title suggests.

On these numbers, usually. Decatur at $132,250 and Peoria at $129,500 sit at or above Chicago-Naperville-Elgin's $129,840, Illinois's flat 4.95% tax applies identically in all of them, no city levies a wage tax, and downstate housing costs a fraction of the collar counties'. The trade-off is employer concentration: downstate plant management markets are dominated by a few large sites.

Because scale and process risk set the rate, not the labour market. Decatur hosts very large agricultural processing operations where a production manager owns continuous-process plant with substantial capital, regulatory and safety exposure. Chicago-area manufacturing is more fragmented — more sites, smaller each — so the median role carries less. The whole Illinois table sits within ten thousand dollars because the same logic operates everywhere in the state.

SOC 11-3051 is a close match rather than an exact one, and it lumps shift-level production managers together with full plant managers. The $82,900 tenth percentile is a supervisor's number and the $205,310 ninetieth is a multi-site director's. If your role is a single department on one shift, the Illinois median of $127,270 will overstate it; if you run a whole plant, it will understate it badly.

They are a substantial part of real earnings and only partly visible here. Illinois production management is a salaried role with continuous accountability — plant call-outs at night, planned shutdown and turnaround periods with sustained long weeks, and annual bonuses tied to safety, throughput and quality metrics. OEWS records annual wages including some of that but not the structure, so two Illinois production managers at the median of $127,270 can have very different jobs and very different total packages depending on whether their site runs continuous process or single-shift assembly.