Consulting · figures from each school’s own report
McKinsey salary after an MBA: the evidence we have
McKinsey publishes no salary grid; 38 of the 56 schools on this site that list employers name it, in 9 countries.
Best fit for consulting, on your salary
UVA Darden
37.3% of the class (about 135 graduates) · $190,000 · payback 3.5 years
Fit score: share of the class (40%), salary (30%) and ten-year NPV for you (30%), each as a percentile among the schools shown. Schools under 5% of the class are not ranked. Method.
| # | School | Share | About | Salary | Payback | 10-year NPV | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | UVA DardenCharlottesville · 21 months | 37.3% | 135 | $190,000 | 3.5 years | $365,502 | 86 |
| 2 | KelloggEvanston · 21 months | 37.5% | 200 | $190,000 | 3.7 years | $349,220 | 84 |
| 3 | Dartmouth TuckHanover · 21 months | 41% | 125 | $190,000 | 3.7 years | $343,094 | 84 |
| 4 | Chicago BoothChicago · 21 months | 36.7% | 233 | $190,000 | 3.5 years | $368,625 | 83 |
| 5 | Duke FuquaDurham · 21 months | 34% | 122 | $190,000 | 3.5 years | $375,543 | 82 |
| 6 | Michigan RossAnn Arbor · 21 months | 33.5% | 127 | $190,000 | 3.4 years | $380,749 | 82 |
| 7 | Yale SOMNew Haven · 21 months | 36.9% | 135 | $190,000 | 3.8 years | $342,309 | 76 |
| 8 | Texas McCombsAustin · 21 months | 28% | 66 | $190,000 | 3.0 years | $428,448 | 74 |
| 9 | MIT SloanCambridge · 21 months | 32.3% | 140 | $190,000 | 3.6 years | $353,870 | 72 |
| 10 | ColumbiaNew York · 20 months | 33.2% | 326 | $190,000 | 3.9 years | $333,666 | 69 |
| 11 | WhartonPhiladelphia · 21 months | 28.2% | 250 | $190,000 | 3.7 years | $348,278 | 69 |
| 12 | Berkeley HaasBerkeley · 21 months | 26.8% | 73 | $190,000 | 3.6 years | $360,456 | 68 |
| 13 | Emory GoizuetaAtlanta · 21 months | 40.8% | 52 | $175,000 | 3.9 years | $282,532 | 67 |
| 14 | Vanderbilt OwenNashville · 21 months | 29% | 46 | $175,000 | 3.6 years | $302,793 | 54 |
| 15 | HarvardBoston · 21 months | 21% | 198 | $190,000 | 3.8 years | $336,138 | 53 |
Share: % of the graduating class (or of those who accepted a job) the school reports for this goal. About: that share applied to the class size. * no salary published for this goal: school-wide figure. Salaries in US dollars at the ECB rate of the last update; “average” marks a mean where the school publishes no median.
Placing graduates here but not ranked: AGSM UNSW 10% (no salary published) · Alliance MBS 12% (no salary published) · CEIBS 9.7% (no living budget published) · EDHEC 10% (no salary published) · Fudan 13.7% (no salary published) · HKU 9% (no salary published) · IE 18.29% (no salary published) · IESE 41% (no salary published) · IIM Ahmedabad PGPX 17.9% (no living budget published) · IIM Bangalore EPGP 50% (no living budget published) · IIM Lucknow IPMX 35% (no living budget published) · Rice Jones 24.1% (no living budget published) · SKK GSB 21% (no salary published) · SMU 10% (no salary published) · WashU Olin 5.8% (no living budget published) · RSM 4% (under 5%).
Built by Radif Partners · figures checked · Method · Editorial policy
There is no official McKinsey salary to quote. The firm publishes no pay grid, and the public files that sometimes reveal a firm's offers, the United States Department of Labor's visa wage disclosures, could not be downloaded when we wrote this page, so we give no McKinsey-specific figure. What can be checked is where McKinsey hires and what those schools report. McKinsey appears in the employer lists of 38 of the 56 schools on this site that publish one, more than any other consulting firm, in 9 countries. Hire counts come from 6 schools: Columbia reports 36 McKinsey hires, and the schools that count add up to 144. At the American schools naming the firm, the consulting median runs from $167,211 to $190,000, with $190,000 in the middle. That is the best public proxy for a McKinsey MBA base salary, not the figure itself. The BLS median of $101,860 for all management analysts is the floor.
What is not public, and why we stop there
Three sources could in principle give a McKinsey salary. The firm itself publishes no pay grid. Offer letters are private. The United States Department of Labor publishes the wages employers declare when they sponsor a foreign worker, and those files sometimes reveal a firm's offer for a job title; they could not be downloaded from our side when this page was written, so they are not used. The firm's own site, mckinsey.com, did not answer our requests either, which is why this page gives no facts about the firm's offices or headcount. Anything beyond that is self-reported on salary websites, which we do not quote.
What remains is indirect but checkable: the schools that name McKinsey as an employer, the number of hires some of them publish, and the consulting salary each reports. The approach answers a narrower question than "what does McKinsey pay": it says what the graduates of schools where McKinsey hires were paid in consulting, which is the figure an applicant can act on.
The breadth of McKinsey recruiting
McKinsey is the consulting firm named by the most schools on this site: 38 of the 56 schools that publish an employer list, in 9 countries (the United Kingdom, the United States, China, Spain, India, France, Singapore, Italy and Ireland). 16 of them are outside the United States, among them Alliance MBS, Cambridge Judge, CEIBS, Esade and IE. No other consulting firm appears in as many lists, and the full count for every firm is on consulting firms that hire MBAs.
A name in a list does not say how many people joined. Some schools list their top employers by hires, others alphabetically, others mix. Only the schools below publish a count, and the share of the class it represents is our division of the count by the class size the school reports.
| School | McKinsey hires | Share of class, about | Consulting salary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Columbia | 36 | 3.7% | $190,000 |
| Chicago Booth | 35 | 5.5% | $190,000 |
| Kellogg | 23 | 4.3% | $190,000 |
| MIT Sloan | 20 | 4.6% | $190,000 |
| Michigan Ross | 16 | 4.2% | $190,000 |
| NYU Stern | 14 | 4.2% | $175,000 |
The schools that publish counts add up to 144 McKinsey hires. Chicago Booth has the highest ratio to its class, about 5.5%, which means roughly one graduate in 18 joined the firm. Those schools are all American; the European and Asian schools that name McKinsey do not publish hire counts.
Columbia: where the class went
Share of the class
33.2%
| Salary reported | $190,000 |
| Graduates, about | 326 |
| Payback with that salary | 3.9 years |
Reference person earning $90,000 before the MBA.
The consulting median as a proxy for the base
At the 21 American schools that name McKinsey and publish a consulting salary, the figure runs from $167,211 to $190,000. The middle of that range is $190,000, and many schools give exactly the same number, which is what a standard base offer from the large strategy firms looks like in a median. The proxy is better at schools where consulting hires are concentrated at the large firms, and weaker where many graduates join specialist or Big 4 practices that pay less.
Outside the United States, the proxy is in local currency. CEIBS reports CN¥597,000, INSEAD reports €106,100, LBS reports £98,856, Oxford Saïd reports £90,746 for consulting hires. Converted at the ECB rate of October 13, 2026, those are lower than American medians, and McKinsey's offices in those regions pay at local scales.
The floor: what the profession pays
The Bureau of Labor Statistics gives the national distribution for management analysts, the occupation that includes all consultants: a median of $101,860 in May 2025, a first quartile of $77,950 and a third of $133,370. A McKinsey consultant hired after an MBA starts above the third quartile on any proxy above. For someone weighing the firm against an MBA's cost, the routes into consulting and the consulting ranking are the next steps; the MBB page compares the three large strategy firms on what the schools show.