Project Manager Salary in Texas 2026,
$98,440 Median | BLS Data by City

A median $98,440 a year, or $47.33 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025 — 3.8% below the national median of $102,320, with no state income tax deducted. The band runs $57,460 at the 10th percentile to $162,780 at the 90th, with the middle half between $74,810 and $129,370. The estimate covers Project Management Specialists as a category rather than any single title.

Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos at $102,390, then Beaumont-Port Arthur $100,470, Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands $99,510, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington $98,900 and Odessa $98,590. Under four thousand dollars covers the whole table, and the notable rows are Beaumont-Port Arthur and Odessa — a refinery town and a Permian Basin city keeping pace with Texas's largest metros.

Because the Texas economy is built on things that are managed as projects. Energy capital investment, refinery and petrochemical turnarounds, pipeline and midstream construction, data centre and semiconductor plants, transport infrastructure and a continuous residential building pipeline all consume project management, and Texas does all of them at scale simultaneously. A location quotient of 1.44 on about 138,960 specialists — roughly one in eight of the country's total — is the result. It also means the market is competitive from the applicant's side.

No. Texas issues no licence or state credential for project management at any level. What the state's employers screen on is sector history: energy and petrochemical project management asks for capital-project and turnaround experience and process-safety competence, construction project management operates under a general contractor's authority rather than the individual's, and defence and aerospace employers require security clearance eligibility. Project Management Institute credentials are common but they are not what distinguishes candidates in this market — the sector record is.

Comfortably. The 3.8% shortfall against the $102,320 national median is smaller than the state income tax a project manager would pay in most other states, so a Texan at the $98,440 median generally keeps more. The offsetting cost is property tax, which in Texas is among the higher effective burdens in the country and is the state's main revenue source. Contract project managers operating through an entity should also understand the state franchise tax, which applies above a revenue threshold.

A different relationship to risk and schedule. A refinery turnaround is a fixed window in which a unit is shut down, and every day of overrun has a direct and very large production cost; the planning horizon is years and the execution horizon is weeks. Capital projects in this sector carry process-safety obligations that make change control a regulatory matter rather than a commercial one, and contractor management involves thousands of temporary craft workers mobilised and demobilised on schedule. Project managers who have done it carry a premium in Texas that generalist delivery managers do not — and it is much of what separates the $98,440 median from the $129,370 seventy-fifth percentile.

SOC 13-1082 is a broad category spanning every industry, so an IT delivery manager in Austin and a petrochemical turnaround manager in Beaumont sit in the same estimate. That is why the band runs from $57,460 to $162,780 while the metro table spans under four thousand dollars — the variation is sectoral and invisible geographically. The wage measure also excludes project-completion and schedule bonuses, which are significant in energy and construction, and contract project management arrangements are captured unevenly.

Sector first — energy, petrochemical and large infrastructure pay above general commercial delivery management in this state, and that is most of the distance from the median to the $129,370 seventy-fifth percentile. Capital project scale second: the move from projects to programmes and capital portfolios. Technical and process-safety depth third, since it is what energy owners and EPC contractors genuinely screen for. And willingness to work turnaround and remote-site schedules fourth, which is how the Permian Basin and Gulf coast markets keep pace with the big metros.