Consultant salary: the national figure and the MBA figure

The national figure: management analysts

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has no "consultant" category. Its closest occupation is management analysts, code 13-1111, people who study how organizations work and recommend changes, whether they work for a consulting firm, a company or a government. In May 2025 it counted 898,280 of them, with a median annual wage of $101,860. The first quartile was $77,950, so a quarter earned less, and the third quartile $133,370. These are gross wages of employees; the survey leaves out the self-employed and bonuses that are not tied to output.

The spread inside the occupation is wide because the work is. A junior analyst in a small regional firm and a senior internal consultant at a federal agency share the code, and neither is paid like a consultant at a large strategy firm. Read the BLS median as the floor of the profession: what someone doing this kind of work earns in an ordinary job, the figure a career changer can expect without the strategy firm route.

Management analysts: where a salary sits in the U.S.

Salary

$

Position

below the median

25th percentile	$77,950
Median	$101,860
75th percentile	$133,370

BLS, May 2025, all employers and levels.

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By city: where the median moves

The BLS publishes the same occupation by metro area. Among the seven large metros we track, the median runs from $104,930 to $135,640:

Boston-Cambridge-Newton leads; Washington-Arlington-Alexandria and San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont follow. Every metro in the table sits above the national median of $101,860, because the large consulting offices are in big cities and the national figure includes smaller places. For an MBA graduate the city matters less at the large firms, which tend to pay one base across their American offices, and more at regional firms that pay at local rates.

The MBA figure: what schools report for consulting

The other series comes from the schools' employment reports, which give a median or average base salary for graduates hired in consulting. 14 of the 29 American schools that publish one give $190,000, 10 give $175,000, and the rest are scattered below. The concentration on one number is the large strategy firms' standard offer showing through: when most of a school's consulting hires join them, the median is their base.

Outside the United States, the figures drop and the currency matters. INSEAD reports €106,100 for consulting, LBS £98,856, and 10 schools outside the United States publish a consulting figure at all. Those salaries pay graduates working across Europe, the Middle East and Asia, at local scales. Converting them at the day's rate, as the table does, makes them comparable but hides the cost of living and tax of each city.

What the base salary leaves out

Consulting pay has three parts: the base, a signing bonus paid on joining, and a performance bonus paid each year. School reports give the base and sometimes a school-wide signing bonus, rarely a consulting one, and never the performance bonus, which arrives after graduation. That is why the figures here are lower than the "total compensation" numbers found on salary websites, which we do not use because they cannot be checked. Pay then rises with each promotion. The pages on McKinsey, BCG and Bain explain what is known about each firm and where the figure stops.

The calculator above places any salary against the BLS distribution for management analysts and the other occupations an MBA graduate moves into, nationally and by metro. To see what a school's consulting salary is worth against its full cost, use the consulting ranking, which adds the payback and the ten-year value for a person earning $90,000 before the degree.