Guides · figures from each school’s own report
Executive MBA: a degree without the salary gap
For a person earning $90,000, the salary given up is 39% of the total cost of a full-time Wharton MBA; in an executive MBA that part is zero.
Paid back after graduation in
3.9 years
Total cost $402,342 · 10-year NPV $312,208
| Tuition and fees, whole program | $186,016 |
| Living budget | $84,866 |
| Salary given up, 21 months | $157,500 |
| Summer internship earned | −$26,040 |
| Total cost | $402,342 |
| Salary after: median base salary | $185,000 |
| Signing bonus × share receiving it | $14,400 |
| 10-year net present value | $312,208 |
| Return on the cost (present values) | 79% |
US dollars at the ECB rate of the last update. Raises of 5% a year with the MBA and 3% without, discounted at 5%, before tax. How this is calculated.
Built by Radif Partners · figures checked · Method · Editorial policy
An executive MBA is taught on weekends or in blocks of a week while you keep your job, so its cost is the tuition, travel and time, but not the salary you give up. That missing line is most of what a full-time degree costs. For a person earning $90,000 before the degree, the full-time MBA at Wharton costs $402,342 in total, of which $157,500 (39%) is salary not earned during 21 months; at INSEAD, a ten-month program, the salary given up is 32% of $231,475. The executive format removes that share and often adds an employer contribution: in the United States, an employer can pay up to $5,250 a year of graduate tuition tax-free for the employee, according to IRS Publication 15-B (2026). The return is harder to measure, because executive students rarely change job at graduation and schools publish no employment report comparable to the full-time ones. Type the tuition of the program you are considering in the calculator below, with your expected raise, to see the payback.
The line that disappears
The total cost of an MBA on this site has four parts: tuition and fees, the living budget, the salary you give up, and, for two-year programs, the internship pay that comes back in the summer. In an executive program, the living budget becomes your ordinary cost of living, which you would pay anyway, and the salary keeps arriving. What remains is tuition, travel to the teaching weekends or modules, and the time taken from work and family.
The weight of the missing line grows with your salary. For a person earning $90,000 before the degree, the salary given up is $157,500 of the $402,342 a full-time Wharton MBA costs. At $150,000, the salary given up reaches $262,500 and the total $507,342. A one-year program cuts the line rather than removing it: INSEAD's ten months still cost $75,000 in salary for the reference person. Use the mini-calculator below to put your own salary and program length into the comparison.
The salary you give up while you study
Salary given up, net of the internship
$157,500
| Gross salary not earned | $157,500 |
| Per month away | $7,500 |
Pension contributions and raises you would have had are not counted here.
What you type, and why we do not
This site reads full-time programs only: their tuition, the student budget the school publishes and their employment report. Executive programs publish their fees on separate pages, often with travel, accommodation during modules and materials priced differently, and we have not read them. Rather than guess, the calculator below asks for the tuition you will pay, the part your employer covers and the raise you expect. It then gives the number of years for that raise to repay what is left to you. It counts no salary given up, because there is none.
Executive or part-time MBA: years for the raise to repay the tuition
Payback
6.0 years
| Tuition left to you | $150,000 |
| Salary given up | $0 |
You keep your salary, so the cost is the tuition alone; the raise is your own assumption.
When an employer pays
Employer sponsorship is common in executive programs and rare in full-time ones, because the employer keeps an employee who is still working. The amounts vary by company and are not public. In the United States, the tax rule sets one reference point: under IRS Publication 15-B (2026), an employer can exclude up to $5,250 a year of educational assistance from the employee's taxable income, and the exclusion applies to graduate-level courses. Above that amount, the benefit is generally taxable as wages unless another rule applies. Sponsorship often comes with conditions, such as staying with the company for a period after the degree or repaying part of the cost, and those conditions change the calculation: a clause that ties you to the employer limits the raise you can negotiate elsewhere.
Ask three questions before counting on it: how much the employer pays and over how many years, what you owe if you leave, and whether the employer expects a role change after the degree. A sponsorship that covers half the tuition and requires two years of service is worth less to a person planning to change jobs than the headline amount suggests.
Why the full-time numbers of this site do not apply
Every salary on this site comes from a full-time employment report, and those reports describe a specific group: graduates who left their job to study, were seeking a new one, and answered the school's survey three months after graduation. The median student of the schools we read arrives with about 6 years of experience. Executive MBA students are further into their careers, mostly stay with their employer and are counted by no MBA CSEA report. A full-time median such as $185,000 at Wharton is the result of a job change, not of the degree alone, and applying it to an executive student would overstate the gain.
Occupational wages give a more useful frame for a manager who stays in place. The BLS median for financial managers was $166,570 in May 2025, for general and operations managers $105,770, each with a wide spread between the bottom and top quarters. The question an executive student should ask is whether the degree moves them up that distribution faster than they would move without it, and only the employer's own promotion practice answers it.
General and operations managers: where a salary sits in the U.S.
Position
below the median
| 25th percentile | $72,320 |
| Median | $105,770 |
| 75th percentile | $167,280 |
BLS, May 2025, all employers and levels.
Choosing between the two formats
The executive format fits a person who wants to grow in the same company or industry, whose employer supports the degree and whose salary makes two years without it expensive. The full-time format fits a change of industry, of function or of country, because it gives a summer internship, campus recruiting and time to look for the new job. The MBA cost page breaks down the full-time total, the online MBA page covers the third route, and the worth-it guide weighs the decision as a whole.