Production Supervisor Salary 2026,
What Production Supervisors Actually Earn

How much do production supervisors make in 2026?

Production supervisors are counted in the BLS first-line supervisors of production and operating workers series: OEWS May 2025 gives the SOC 51-1011 national median as $74,450 a year ($35.79 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $47,130 and the top 10% at $108,750. The role is the first line of management on a manufacturing floor: running a shift or a production area, allocating people to lines and cells, hitting output and quality targets, managing absence and performance, responding to breakdowns and quality escapes, and enforcing safety. Three factors explain most of the pay range. Industry is the strongest — chemical, pharmaceutical, aerospace and heavy industrial plants pay their supervisors well above food processing and light assembly, following the underlying operator rates and the technical complexity of the process. Shift pattern is second: supervisors on nights and continuous rotating patterns typically earn a premium, and in twenty-four hour operations this is a meaningful share of pay. Scope is third — supervising twelve people on one line differs from running a shift of sixty across an area. The transition into this role is where many manufacturing careers stall, because the skills that make a strong operator do not automatically make a competent supervisor, and employers increasingly train for it explicitly. Employment is projected to grow 1.2% through 2034 with roughly 67,700 openings a year. → Full production supervisor career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $74,450 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 51-1011, 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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