Quality Manager Salary 2026,
What Quality Managers Actually Earn

How much do quality managers make in 2026?

Quality 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. Quality management typically sits around and somewhat below that midpoint at plant level, since the series is dominated by production and plant leadership roles with direct output accountability, and above it in regulated industries where the quality function carries legal and licensing weight. That regulatory dimension is the single clearest pay driver. In pharmaceutical, medical device and aerospace manufacturing, the quality organisation holds authority that production cannot override — batch release, design controls, part certification — and the people holding it are paid accordingly. In automotive supply, IATF certification and customer-specific requirements create a similar if less legally weighted structure. In general manufacturing operating to a standard quality management system, the role is closer to a plant support function and sits lower in the band. Within any of those settings, pay follows how much of the system the manager owns: auditing and documentation at the lower end, full quality management system ownership including supplier quality, customer complaints and corrective action at the upper. Employment is projected to grow 1.9% through 2034 with roughly 17,100 openings a year. → Full quality 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 →