Marketing Salaries in 2026: What Marketing and Creative Roles Pay, From Recent Searches

Last updated: October 1, 2026

By Samantha Litman, Executive Search, Marketing, Creative & Media, KORE1

Marketing salaries in 2026 run from about $65,000 for an ad operations seat to $300,000 plus upside for an executive producer, going by the ranges on recent agency and creative searches. Federal wage data puts the median marketing specialist at $78,760 and the median marketing manager at $166,790. Most of the distance between any two numbers you’ll see is level.

You came for the numbers. They’re in the second table down, role by role, written the way I’d say them to you on a call. The caveats come after. Promise.

A question I get all the time is what a role pays. It sounds like it should have a one-line answer, and it never does, because my first answer is always three more questions. Which version of the role? Agency side or brand side? Is this person running a team, or doing the work?

I’m one of KORE1’s marketing recruiters. The seats I fill are marketing, creative, and media ones, and I’ve been doing some version of this job for more than 25 years. So when I say ranges from recent searches, I mean exactly that. These are the numbers attached to roles I’ve worked on lately. Nobody surveyed anybody. Next to each one I’ve put the federal wage figure for the closest job category, so you can see where a real search lands against the official middle of the market.

One more thing before the tables. I earn a living when companies hire, so I have every reason to tell you to pay more. Keep that in mind. Then look at where the less senior seats land, because a few of them sit below the federal median, and I left them right where they were instead of rounding anything up.

What Do Marketing Jobs Pay in 2026?

Marketing salaries in the United States sit on two rungs in federal data. Marketing specialists and analysts, the people doing the work, earned a median of $78,760 in May 2025. Marketing managers, the people directing it, earned $166,790. Creative and production jobs are counted on their own lines, and most of those fall between the two.

Both come out of the May 2025 wage survey the Bureau of Labor Statistics runs, which is the newest one out. It counts people on a payroll. Freelancers aren’t in it. Seven of its lines matter for the roles I work on.

Stay on the first row for a second. 395,240 marketing managers at a median of $166,790. Does that look high to you? It should.

Type “marketing manager salary” into the big salary sites and you get a completely different picture. As of October 2026, PayScale shows an average base of $76,775, and ZipRecruiter says $83,488. Built In reports $94,787 in base pay. Glassdoor puts median total pay, bonus included, at about $105,000. Five sources. The federal one is more than double the lowest.

Nobody’s lying. The government is counting an occupation, and the Labor Department’s own job database, O*NET, lists marketing director and brand manager among the titles inside it. The salary sites are counting people who typed two words into a profile. One group leans toward people running departments. The other is mostly mid-level. I wrote a whole piece on what a marketing title tells a candidate, so I’ll skip the long version. The short one? Two words on a posting say almost nothing about level. Level is the thing you pay for.

Ranges From My Recent Searches

Now mine. I wrote these down in September 2026.

Each line is the range a recent search was working with. Where you see plus upside, there was more than salary in the deal, and I’ll come back to that. The two columns on the right are federal. They show the closest government job category and where my range falls inside it, so you can see how far a real search sits from the official midpoint for that kind of work.

Go down the list and it splits in two.

The hands-on seats hug the federal middle. Media planners and buyers at $75,000 to $85,000 sit right on the $78,760 median for marketing specialists, the category both jobs get counted in. Ad operations starts a little under it. Agencies pay that same category a median of $76,660. No surprises there.

Art directors come in under their federal median, and that one confuses people. $85,000 to $100,000 against $114,850? Blame the category. The government files creative directors, design directors, and creative services managers under art directors too, and all of them pull the middle up. A working art director, the person with their hands on the file, lands between the 25th percentile and the median. So does my range.

Then the leadership seats, which don’t hug anything. A creative director at $200,000 plus upside is sitting just under the point where the top tenth of that same category begins, $213,050, and that’s before a dollar of bonus. A head of production, at $150,000 to $200,000, starts above the 75th percentile for producers and directors and runs right up to where the top tenth of that group begins. And an executive producer at $300,000 plus upside is past the national top tenth entirely, so far past it that you have to go to Los Angeles, where the top tenth of producers and directors starts at $325,310, to find a federal number that reaches.

Analytics and brand strategy sit in between. Nobody publishes a federal line for a VP of analytics at a media agency, so I’ve set it against marketing managers, because that’s the level of the job even if it isn’t the craft. $200,000 to $220,000 is right around that category’s 75th percentile. Would you rather compare against the craft? Data scientists have a median of $120,230 and a top tenth that starts at $199,130. Either way it’s a senior number for a senior seat. The brand strategy figure, $180,000, clears the $168,420 median for agency-side marketing managers. That reads as a strategy lead. A strategist a few years in gets counted with the specialists, and paid a lot closer to that line.

Motion design is the one I’d flag. $75,000 to $150,000 is the widest range on the page, and that’s the honest shape of it, because one title covers a junior animator cutting social versions and a senior lead designing a title sequence. The federal category runs from $75,490 at the 25th percentile to $139,130 at the 75th. Nearly the same spread. So motion designer, on its own, tells you the craft. Only the level tells you which end you’re on.

One seat is missing on purpose. Agency account leadership. The titles there slide around so much from shop to shop that a single number would mislead you, since an account manager at one agency is doing an account director’s job at the next. If that’s your search, the percentile breakdown on our agency account director page is the better read. Product marketing and UX have their own guides too, one on what product marketing managers earn and one on UX designer pay.

No cities next to any of these, you’ll notice. That’s deliberate. A range moves with the market, the size of the shop, and who the role reports to, and I’d rather you ask me about your seat than borrow a number built for someone else’s.

Why Are My Numbers Higher Than the Federal Ones?

Mostly level. Partly me.

Start with me. A search that reaches a recruiter is rarely a routine one. Companies with big internal recruiting teams fill their junior and mid-level seats themselves, and they don’t often need outside help. What I see more of is a company that has trimmed its internal team, picks up new business, and needs a senior person quickly. So the roles that land on my desk lean senior. My ranges do too. Read them that way.

Now level. A median is the middle of everybody in a category. For producers and directors that’s 143,120 people, from a local news producer to the person running production for a whole studio, and the middle of that very mixed crowd earns $90,360. A head of production sits near the top of it. The top is where the federal table says $198,540 and up. A producer who builds live brand activations is a separate search again, covered on our page about hiring for live brand experiences.

Geography does the rest. Agency and entertainment work clusters in a couple of cities, and the federal numbers there run well above the national line. In Los Angeles the median art director earns $137,560. In New York, $142,990. Nationally it’s $114,850. Marketing managers in New York have a median of $192,840. Producers and directors in Los Angeles, $131,600. Same jobs. Different zip codes.

Put those three together and most of the gap closes, which is the useful part. When your number and the public number are far apart, it usually means you’re looking at the wrong level, the wrong market, or a category that’s holding five different jobs. Find out which one before you decide somebody is overpaid.

What Does Plus Upside Actually Mean?

Two of my ranges end in plus upside. Creative director and executive producer.

It means the salary is the floor of the conversation. On top of it sits a bonus, a profit share, sometimes equity, sometimes a piece of the business the person brings in or keeps. Every company builds it differently and pays it out differently, so I didn’t try to hang a number on it. I’d be making it up. I won’t.

Further down the ladder the extra money is real but smaller. Glassdoor’s marketing manager page shows $17,000 to $33,000 in additional pay on top of a base of $64,000 to $104,000. PayScale’s bonus line for that title runs $1,000 to $14,000. Nice to have. At the top of the ladder it stops being a rounding error, and it can decide whether someone takes your call at all.

So ask. If you’re the candidate, ask what the upside was based on last year and what it really paid. If you’re the one hiring, settle that before the first interview, because a senior person will bring it up in the second one. And “we’ll figure it out” doesn’t count as a number.

Is the Compensation Too Low for What I’m Asking For?

Clients ask me this in almost exactly those words. I love that they ask. It usually means they already suspect the answer.

I had a call like this not long ago. The description said head of production, with the whole studio, every vendor, and a team reporting in. The budget said senior producer. Lovely people. Two different jobs. It happens. There are four checks I’d run before a posting like that goes up.

• Read the job description back and ask what level it describes. Then find where your number falls in that federal category. If the description says director and the money says 25th percentile, you’ve found the problem, and it took four minutes.
• Who do you like so far? If every candidate you get excited about turns out to be one level below what you wrote down, the market is telling you what your budget buys.
• Silence after the number comes up. People who were warm on the first call and stop replying once pay is on the table rarely tell you why.
• Your own team. Would the new hire out-earn the person they report to, or come in under the people they’d manage? Fix that first.

And if the budget can’t move? Then change something else. Hire one level down and grow the person. Split a role that’s really two jobs. Or make it a contract-to-hire start, so the first few months settle the argument about the number.

What doesn’t work is posting the low number and hoping. A role that sits open for three months has its own price, and nobody budgets for that one either. When a search has gone quiet, pay is one of the first places I look, and I’ve laid out how to find where a stalled search is stuck if that’s where you are.

The Range on the Posting Has Rules Now

If you hire in California or New York, and a lot of agency and entertainment hiring happens in one or the other, the range on the posting is no longer optional.

California requires any employer that has at least 15 people to put the pay scale in every job posting, according to the state Labor Commissioner’s Office. The definition matters. A pay scale is a good-faith estimate of what you reasonably expect to pay for the position when the person is hired, as a salary or an hourly wage range, and bonuses don’t have to be in it. New York’s law covers businesses with four or more employees and asks for the minimum and maximum pay the employer believes to be accurate when the job is posted, per the New York State Department of Labor.

I’m a recruiter, not a lawyer, so check your own situation with counsel. What I do know is how candidates treat a posted range.

They read the top. Always. Post $90,000 to $180,000 and every person who applies has $180,000 in their head, and you’ve also told them you haven’t decided what level you’re hiring, which is not the first impression you were going for. Remember the motion designer range? $75,000 to $150,000 describes a whole category of people. It shouldn’t be on a single posting. Pick the level, then post the slice that goes with it. That’s the whole trick. And since bonuses don’t have to be listed, a senior posting can look lower than the job really pays. If there’s upside, say so. One sentence does it.

Five Questions Before You Write the Number

I ask a lot of questions. It’s most of the job. These are the five I’d want answered before a range goes anywhere near a posting.

What level is this, really? Forget the title for a minute. Count the people who report in, the budget, and who this person presents to. Then find that level in the first table.

Agency side or brand side? For managers it barely matters. Lower down, it does. Marketing specialists earn a federal median of $76,660 at advertising and PR firms and $99,850 at corporate headquarters, so a specialist moving from an agency to a brand expects a raise, and a brand trying to hire one away at agency money is going to hear no.

Which city are you competing in? I don’t mean your office. I mean wherever the people you want already work. KORE1 has recruiters working in 30+ metro areas around the country, so odds are good someone here has run a search in yours, and the salary benchmark assistant costs nothing and makes a decent first look by city.

Is there upside, and can you describe it in one sentence? If you can’t, the candidate can’t either.

Where did the number come from? I like this one best, since the answer so often turns out to be “it’s what the last person made.” And the last person was hired a while ago. The federal median for marketing managers was $161,030 in last year’s edition of the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, which used May 2024 data, and it’s $166,790 in the current one. That’s one year. A number that old has drifted. For the longer method of rebuilding one, KORE1 has a full piece on compensation benchmarking.

Asked on Almost Every Intake Call

So What Does a Marketing Job Actually Pay in 2026?

$78,760 is the federal median for marketing specialists and analysts, and $166,790 is the median for marketing managers, both as of May 2025, per the BLS.

Creative and production roles mostly fall between those two at the median. Senior agency seats run well past them. In my recent searches a creative director was at $200,000 plus upside and an executive producer at $300,000 plus upside.

Agency or Brand Side, Who Pays More?

At the manager level it’s close to a tie, with agency-side marketing managers earning a federal median of $168,420 against $166,790 across all industries.

Below that, brands win on salary. By a lot. Specialists earn about $23,000 more at corporate headquarters than at agencies, at the median.

Does the Range Have to Go on the Job Posting?

In California and New York it does for most employers, since California’s rule starts at 15 employees and New York’s at four.

Other states and cities have their own versions, and they keep changing, so ask your employment counsel before you post. I’d include a range anyway. It saves both sides a wasted first call.

Realistically, How Often Does a Range Need Rechecking?

Once a year at minimum, and again before any search for a role you haven’t hired in a while.

Pay moves faster than most org charts do. The federal median for marketing managers went up about 3.6% in a single survey year, and advertising and promotions managers went from $126,960 to $133,660, a little over 5% in the same year. A range you set two years ago was set for a different market.

Do Freelance and Contract Rates Follow These Ranges?

Not directly, because an hourly or day rate has to cover things a salary doesn’t, like benefits and the gaps between projects.

A rough starting point is the annual salary divided by 2,080 working hours. Then it goes up from there. KORE1’s graphic designer staffing page puts contract designers at $40 to $90 an hour, to give you one real example. Weighing a project hire against a permanent one? Price both before you decide.

Where Did Your Number Come From?

One question back at you. Think about the role you’re about to post, or the one that’s been open too long. Where did the number come from?

If you know, and it holds up against the tables above, post it and go. If it came from a salary site, or from what the last person made, or from a meeting nobody remembers, that’s worth ten minutes now instead of ten weeks into the search. KORE1 has been at this since 2005, and the firm’s twelve-month retention rate is 92%. I’d argue a fair number on day one is part of why people stay. Most of what I work on is permanent, so a direct hire search is usually how we’d run it. Bring me the role and the range you’re thinking about. I’ll tell you what I’m seeing. Let’s talk. I’m on LinkedIn too, if a quick message is easier.