Consulting Salary Report 2026: Check the Number Yourself

The fiscal 2026 record this salary report reads

A Labor Condition Application is the form a US employer files before employing someone on an H-1B, H-1B1 or E-3 visa. The Department of Labor publishes the resulting data quarterly, and describes it as "selected information extracted from nonimmigrant and immigrant application tables within the Office of Foreign Labor Certification's case management systems", on its performance data page, checked 29 September 2026.

The third quarter fiscal 2026 file holds 1,032,735 determination records. Every decision in it was made between 1 October 2025 and 30 June 2026. Each row carries the employer, the job title as the employer wrote it, the worksite city and state, the wage, and the local prevailing wage the filing was tested against.

One rule makes those wages worth reading. The wage rule states that the rate "must be the higher of the actual wage rate (the rate the employer pays to all other individuals with similar experience and qualifications who are performing the same job), or the prevailing wage". A filed figure is therefore anchored to internal pay for the same job, which is what no salary survey can claim.

Two limits, before any number. The file carries salary alone, with no bonus in it. And it covers sponsored roles, so a firm that sponsors nobody is absent.

The sixteen consulting employers inside it

Filtering that file to the consulting employers in our coverage returns 12,371 records, of which 12,211 were certified. Ranked by volume, with the filing entity as it appears in the record.

These sixteen do not account for the whole 12,371, because several firms file under more than one legal entity and some entities carry fewer than ten records. Two rows need their basis said out loud. The PwC row counts certified filings for the entity named, and a second PwC entity, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, files 112 more records under the same five grade names, which our PwC page reads separately. The Bain row adds two spellings of one company name in the same file.

Read the column as filing volume rather than as hiring volume: it counts sponsored roles, and sponsorship rates differ by firm. The order still matters for one reason. A firm with 671 records supports a readable band; a firm with 10 supports an observation.

How wide the consulting salary is at each rung

Rather than repeat a firm by firm grid, here is the distance between the lowest and the highest filed floor at each rung, with the filer at each end. Titles differ between firms, so rungs are grouped by what the band pays.

The two entry rungs are tight enough to sit inside one signing bonus, which the school reports below put at a $30,000 median. Narrow the post-MBA row to the strategy firms alone and it tightens further, from $185,000 at L.E.K. to $192,000, which is $7,000 across the firms most candidates are choosing between. The manager and principal rungs are wider because the titles stop lining up rather than because the market disagrees with itself: L.E.K. files its Engagement Manager floor $41,500 above McKinsey's Engagement Manager floor, and Roland Berger files a Principal floor of $270,000 where Bain files an Associate Partner at $260,000. Both of those ends rest on a handful of filings, five for L.E.K. and three for Roland Berger, against 61 behind McKinsey's figure, so read the two wide rows as the edges of the market and the narrow rows as its middle.

The partner row behaves differently on purpose. McKinsey filed five Partner records at a flat $275,000 and one Senior Partner at $375,000. Oliver Wyman filed six Partner records carrying six different figures, from $290,000 to $427,000, and one L.E.K. Managing Director record carries $500,000 on its own. At that level pay becomes individual, and a spread of $158,600 is a sign that the word band has stopped meaning anything.

The previous filing period, and one firm's consulting salary

Year on year claims are the weakest part of every salary report, including ours, so here is the comparison with its sample size attached. The July to September 2025 file covers that quarter only. McKinsey is the one firm with enough filings in both periods to line up.

Every floor below Engagement Manager held. Every ceiling came down: the Associate ceiling by $240,300 minus $212,000, which is $28,300, and the Engagement Manager floor by $220,000 minus $200,000, which is $20,000.

Read that carefully. The earlier quarter carries between four and eight filings per title, so this compares filing practice across two windows rather than proving a pay cut. What it does rule out is any claim that entry floors rose, since $112,000 and $192,000 appear unchanged in both.

For the class level trend, MIT Sloan tracks the consulting share of its graduating class across three years: 33.7 percent in 2023, 32.1 percent in 2024, 32.3 percent in 2025. Consulting stayed the largest single destination throughout.

What the Class of 2025 reports put beside it

Five business schools published consulting outcomes for the Class of 2025, officially and with dates. Their medians describe every consulting employer a class joined, which is a wider population than the strategy firms above.

Wharton's 2025 Career Report, created 19 December 2025, gives a consulting median base of $190,000 on 28.2 percent of accepted offers by industry, and $183,976 on 31.4 percent by function. That $6,024 difference sits inside one document about one class, because industry and function count different people.

Kellogg reports the same $190,000 median for the 38 percent of its class entering consulting, with a $30,000 median signing bonus, measured three months after graduation, from the 83 percent of graduates who reported usable salary information. Tuck reports 41 percent of its class into consulting at a $190,000 median, with signing bonuses from $10,000 to $50,000. Booth puts 37.8 percent into a consulting function on a class wide median of $175,000. MIT Sloan gives a consulting mean of $183,928 under a median of $190,000, with the 25th percentile equal to that median, which describes a class clustered at one number with a thin low tail.

Why a first-year total cannot be sourced

Search results this month quote first-year totals for named firms, sometimes to the hundred dollars. No primary source read for this report publishes one, and the reason is that the pieces live in different places.

Wharton says so in its own words: its median is "for one year only. Does not include discretionary bonuses, options and carried interest in partnerships." The filings carry salary by definition. Bain's Consultant posting lists the components without amounts: "base salary, annual discretionary performance bonus, 401(k) plan with an annual employer contribution based on years of service, and Bain's best in class benefits package".

There is a trap worth naming here. That same Bain posting does carry a bonus percentage, and it sits inside the block headed as a note for Italy, after the Italian base figure. It is Italian pay transparency text. Reading it as a US bonus ceiling is the kind of error that spreads once and then gets quoted for a year.

So a total is an estimate with a salary inside it. That is publishable if the estimate is labeled. It stops being publishable when the label comes off, which is what has happened to most of the totals in circulation.

Four questions to ask of any figure you are quoted

Any consulting salary number, including the ones above, survives or fails on four answers.

1. What period is this? A figure with no filing window or graduating class attached cannot be compared with anything. Ours is 1 October 2025 to 30 June 2026.
2. Is it a salary or a total? If it includes bonus, ask which component supplied which dollars, and who published each one.
3. Who owns the number? The firm owns its posting. The Department of Labor owns the filing. A school owns its class report. A survey owns its own respondents, and cannot speak for the firm.
4. What is the sample? Five partner filings is five partner filings. A median from 439 records is a different kind of statement, and the count belongs next to the figure.

Run those four on any grid you find, including the ones ranking firms by total package. Most of them fail question one.

When this record goes stale, and what replaces it

This matters more for salary pages than for anything else we publish, and it is the part such pages usually skip.

The Department publishes these files quarterly, and a quarterly file is not cumulative across the fiscal year. The file used here covers three quarters, from 1 October 2025 to 30 June 2026. The earlier file used for the comparison covers 1 July to 30 September 2025 and nothing else. Checking the period before comparing two files is therefore the first step, since a fiscal fourth quarter file and a third quarter file describe different lengths of time.

What that means for you. When the fiscal 2026 fourth quarter file appears, the bands here can shift, and the ones most likely to shift are those resting on few filings, which is every row above Engagement Manager. School reports for the Class of 2026 will land on their own calendar, in the winter, from the same pages linked above.

Where to go from here. The consulting salary guide lays out the same record firm by firm and level by level. Pay by city separates the office effect from the level effect. McKinsey pay by level reads one firm end to end, and offer negotiation covers which line of a letter actually moves.

What this record cannot see

Firms that sponsor nobody. No filings, no rows, nothing said about their pay.

Staff outside a filing. The actual wage rule ties a filed number to comparable internal pay, which is the strongest available claim from this source. It does not make the sample a census.

Bonus by firm. Nobody publishes it. Class medians are the nearest public figure, and they are class medians.

Everything outside the United States. This is a US filing system.

First-hand accounts. We looked for candidate reports of offer letters on 29 September 2026 and found none we could cite, including through a headless browser. The attempts are dated in our research file, and nothing on this page is built on an anecdote we could not read.

Before an offer exists there is an interview, and that is the part still open to you. Our structure drill grades a case structure against four weights we set and publish on the method page: Coverage 45, Separation 25, Depth 20, Concision 10. No consulting firm publishes a rubric, so those weights are ours and should be read as our judgment. The drill grades structure alone and teaches no business content, and our assessment simulators are not running: the /assessments page says 0 of 6 simulators are live, in those exact words, today.

What changed in this report, and when

30 September 2026. Three figures moved after a cross-check against our firm by firm pages, and all three moved toward the certified recount of the same file.

The rung spread table understated two rows. It gave BCG's $225,400 Project Leader floor as the highest manager level floor filed, and Bain's $260,000 Associate Partner as the highest principal level floor. Both were the highest among the three largest filers rather than the highest in the file at all. L.E.K. files an Engagement Manager floor of $241,500 and Roland Berger a Principal floor of $270,000, which puts the manager spread at $41,500 and the principal spread at $27,000. The sentence after the table claimed four of the five spreads fit inside one signing bonus. Three of them do.

The employer table carried PwC at 629 records, a figure from an entity name match that missed filings, against 754 certified records for the entity our PwC page reads end to end. The Bain row read 111 where two spellings of the same company name in the same file total 112. Neither change touches a band on this page, and both bases are now stated under the table.