Telecom Director Salary 2026,
What Telecom Directors Actually Earn

How much do telecom directors make in 2026?

Telecom directors are counted in the BLS computer and information systems managers series: OEWS May 2025 puts SOC 11-3021 at a national median of $175,140 a year ($84.20 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $107,550 and the top 10% at $297,510. Two disclosures belong up front. First, the series pools technology management across every industry and organisation size — 670,570 managers, from IT managers at mid-sized firms to executives at large enterprises — so the median is a technology-management marker rather than a telecom-director figure. Second, OEWS measures wages, and at this level compensation is built from base salary plus annual incentive and, at public companies and larger carriers, long-term incentive and equity, so the P75 and P90 shown here understate real packages toward the top of the market. Within the band, position is set by what the director owns. A telecom director running enterprise voice and connectivity for a company sits lower than one running network operations, engineering or a service line at a carrier, where the scope includes capital budget, vendor contracts worth substantial sums, and regulatory and service obligations. Employment is projected to grow 15.2% through 2034 with roughly 55,600 openings a year. → Full telecom director career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $175,140 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 11-3021, 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 →