Marketing Salaries

What the levels mean

Marketing titles are not standardised across companies, so the same job can carry very different names. These levels describe scope and budget ownership rather than title, which is what actually determines pay.

Every job title in detail

Total compensation percentiles for each title, by region. Each band spans the levels we hold for that role, so it describes the realistic career range rather than a single job.

City adjustments

Multipliers apply to that city's own regional baseline, not to a global average. A senior paid media manager on a US median total of $163k would sit near $209k in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bear in mind that a location premium is not the same as more money in real terms — the largest premiums are mostly absorbed by housing costs.

Frequently asked questions

How much should a CMO earn?

In the United States, a Chief Marketing Officer earns a median total compensation of roughly $444,000 at a scale-up (51–200 employees) and around $612,000 at an enterprise, with base salary making up $270,000 and $392,000 of those respectively. In the United Kingdom the equivalent medians are approximately £202,000 and £294,000. Company stage moves CMO pay more than any other factor, because equity is a much larger share of the package at earlier-stage companies. A first-CMO role at a seed-stage startup frequently pays a base near $211,000 or £119,000 while offering equity that dwarfs it on paper.

What is a typical marketing salary by experience level?

Across roles, entry-level marketing base salaries cluster around $61,000–$68,000 in the US and £25,000–£28,000 in the UK. Mid-level sits at roughly $80,000–$90,000 and £36,000–£41,000. Senior individual contributors reach $109,000–$123,000 and £50,000–£57,000. Lead and manager roles run $127,000–$152,000 and £59,000–£71,000, and director-level roles owning a function and its budget run $170,000–$191,000 and £89,000–£100,000. VP and C-level compensation depends far more on company size and equity than on years of experience.

Which marketing roles pay the most?

Excluding leadership, the best-paid marketing roles are the ones closest to engineering and data. Growth engineers and developer advocates top the range because they compete for the same people as software engineering. Product marketing is the highest-paid conventional marketing role, followed by head of growth, marketing operations, and marketing analytics. Content, social media, design, and community roles sit at the lower end at equivalent seniority. The single largest determinant of pay within any given role, though, is the size of the budget or revenue number attached to it.

How much does company size affect marketing pay?

Substantially, and not in one direction. For mid and senior individual contributors the curve is straightforward: an enterprise pays roughly 25–30% more base than a startup for the same job. At the top of the ladder it inverts. A funded startup hiring its first marketing leader is competing for that person against Series B companies rather than against regional employers, so its cash offer sits close to — occasionally above — what a mid-market company pays a VP. Equity moves the opposite way throughout, making up a much larger share of the package at startups. The result is that total compensation at a well-funded scale-up can match an enterprise, but with far more of it at risk.

How much more do marketing roles pay in major cities?

On US government wage data for 2025, the San Jose metro pays about 44% above the national average for marketing managers and the San Francisco Bay Area about 33%, with Boston at 22% and New York at 17%. Several large metros sit below the national average — Chicago and Atlanta at roughly 3% below, Dallas 8% below, Miami 12% below. London pays approximately 18% above the UK baseline, though the premium is much larger for directors than for PR and communications roles. Note that a location premium is not the same as more money in real terms, and that where a metro’s mean premium far exceeds its median premium, as in San Jose and Los Angeles, the uplift is concentrated at senior levels rather than spread across the ladder.

Is AI changing marketing salaries?

It is changing them unevenly, and mostly as a skill premium rather than as a new job title. Analysis of over a billion job postings finds that listings requiring AI skills advertise substantially higher salaries, and 37% of US marketing leaders name AI and machine learning as a skill they pay more for — behind digital marketing strategy but ahead of marketing automation. The clearer effect is on the shape of hiring rather than on pay levels: entry-level marketing postings fell 8.6% year on year through late 2025 while director-level-and-above postings rose, and roughly one in three companies reported reducing entry-level marketing hiring. Growth marketing, partner marketing, and product marketing expanded; communications, general marketing, and analytical marketing contracted. Execution-heavy roles are compressing at the bottom while analytical and strategic ones widen at the top.

Should I use these figures to negotiate a salary?

Use them as orientation, not as evidence. These are benchmarks compiled from public sources and, for most cells, modelled from a published anchor rather than observed directly. Any individual offer legitimately varies with the size of the budget you would own, the revenue you would be accountable for, the funding position of the company, and your own track record. The most useful thing you can do with a band is understand where a specific offer sits within it and ask what would move it upward.

How much of a marketing budget goes to salaries?

Headcount is usually the single largest line in a marketing budget, typically consuming 40–60% of total marketing spend for an in-house team, with the remainder split across paid media, tools, agencies, and programmes. A team weighted toward content and brand tends to sit at the higher end of that range because those functions are labour-intensive; a team weighted toward paid acquisition sits lower, because media spend dominates. This is the main reason salary benchmarks matter for budget planning — a hiring plan is a budget commitment several times larger than the tools line it usually gets compared against.

How often is this data updated?

The dataset is rebuilt whenever its underlying sources publish a new edition, which in practice means a review roughly every quarter. The last update date is shown at the top of this page and in the machine-readable version. The US Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release lands each spring for the previous May, the UK Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings each autumn, and the major recruiter guides once a year, so most figures move once or twice per year rather than continuously.

Methodology & sources

These figures are compiled from published government wage statistics, recruiter salary guides, and payroll and self-reported compensation aggregates, then indexed forward to mid-2026. They are benchmarks for orientation and budgeting, not offers — and every band here is wide for a reason, because real compensation varies enormously on factors no dataset captures.

Sources