QA Manager Salary 2026,
What QA Managers Actually Earn

How much do qa managers make in 2026?

Quality assurance managers in manufacturing are counted in the BLS industrial production managers series: OEWS May 2025 gives the SOC 11-3051 national median as $126,060 a year ($60.61 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $78,000 and the top 10% at $205,520. Assurance is the systems half of quality, and its pay follows regulatory weight rather than plant size. The role owns the quality management system itself: written procedures and their control, internal audit programmes, hosting customer and certification audits, corrective and preventive action, change control, validation and qualification records where applicable, training records and management review. In general manufacturing operating to a standard quality system, that work sits around or below the series midpoint. In pharmaceutical, medical device, food and aerospace manufacturing it sits well above, because the quality assurance function holds authority that production cannot override and because a regulatory finding can halt shipment or licence. Position within the band also follows how much of the supply base a manager governs, since supplier qualification and audit is increasingly where manufacturing quality risk actually sits. The structural feature of the job is independence: an assurance manager who can be overruled by a shipping deadline is not performing the function the standard describes. Employment is projected to grow 1.9% through 2034 with roughly 17,100 openings a year. → Full qa manager career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $126,060 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 11-3051, 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 →