Project Management Specialists salary in Chicago, Illinois

About 19,130 Project Management Specialists worked in the Chicago metro in 2024, making it one of the larger concentrations of this role in the country. The median annual wage came in at $104,640, roughly 2% above the Illinois median of $102,490 and about 4% above the national median of $100,946. The gaps are real but modest: Chicago pays above both benchmarks, just not by a wide margin.

The more telling figure is the spread from bottom to top. At the 10th percentile, Project Management Specialists in Chicago earned $62,620. At the 90th, they earned $161,980. Top earners in this metro make about 2.6 times what those at the entry end do. That kind of range shows up when a single job title covers a lot of ground: an associate PM coordinating small internal projects sits in the same occupational bucket as a senior program manager running a $50 million infrastructure rollout.

The mean wage of $111,740 runs about $7,100 above the median. That gap tells us a portion of high earners in Chicago pull the average up, though not dramatically. In practical terms, the typical PM in the metro lands somewhere between $79,540 (25th percentile) and $137,420 (75th percentile), a $58,000 range that reflects differences in experience, industry, and scope of work.

Illinois outside Chicago pulls the state median down slightly below the Chicago figure, so the metro does carry a small premium over the broader state average. Whether that holds across future BLS releases is something we will revisit when the 2025 data arrives.