Quality Control Manager Salary 2026,
What Quality Control Managers Actually Earn

How much do quality control managers make in 2026?

Quality control managers are counted in the BLS industrial production managers series: OEWS May 2025 puts the SOC 11-3051 national median at $126,060 a year ($60.61 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $78,000 and the top 10% at $205,520. Quality control management typically sits below that midpoint in general manufacturing and around or above it in laboratory-intensive and regulated settings, and the distinction between control and assurance explains why. Quality control is the operational side of quality: inspection resources and their scheduling, laboratory testing, measurement and calibration systems, in-process and final release checks, non-conforming material handling and the data that comes out of all of it. Quality assurance is the systems side — procedures, audits, corrective action and regulatory compliance. Many organisations combine both under one manager, and where they do, pay reflects the wider scope. Where the control function stands alone, pay follows the technical intensity of the testing involved: pharmaceutical, food, chemical and materials laboratories with method validation, stability testing and accredited scopes pay well above a plant with hand gauges and a few inspectors. Managing accredited laboratory scope specifically carries a premium, because accreditation is difficult to obtain and expensive to lose. Employment is projected to grow 1.9% through 2034 with roughly 17,100 openings a year. → Full quality control 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 →