Tenant Improvement Project Manager Salary Guide 2026

Tenant improvement PM pay by level, 2026

Interiors teams run a tighter ladder than ground-up groups: fewer rungs, faster promotion, and a project executive who signs for a portfolio of thirty jobs rather than three. The bands below map that ladder onto the public data — BLS percentiles for the occupation, recruiter guide bands for the title, and posted ranges where employers have had to publish them.

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025 for SOC 11-9021, 47-1011 and 13-1051 (released 15 May 2026); The Birmingham Group construction salary guides (7 Sept 2025, 5 Nov 2025, 29 June 2026); Salary.com and ZipRecruiter national benchmarks dated 2026; Glassdoor U.S. averages; JLL pay-transparency posting via Built In (retrieved Aug 2026).

How TI pay compares with ground-up commercial

On The Birmingham Group’s own 2026 sector bands, commercial office and retail sits at the bottom of the nonresidential ladder at $105,000-$140,000, below industrial at $110,000-$145,000, heavy civil at $120,000-$155,000, data centers at $125,000-$165,000 and healthcare and pharmaceutical at $130,000-$170,000. Take the midpoints and a TI-weighted commercial PM runs roughly 10-20% behind a ground-up peer at the same tenure. The mechanism is contract value: the same firm’s 29 June 2026 project-executive guide scales pay with annual build volume under signature, from $130M-$150M at one end to $250M-$300M at the other, and a fit-out PM running twelve $2M jobs carries less signed value than a ground-up PM running one $60M tower — even though the interiors workload is arguably harder to schedule. Interiors closes part of that gap through bonus on margin, which is often richer per dollar of revenue on fast, high-turn TI work, and through metro: BLS medians in New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Boston all clear $156,000.

What pushes an interiors PM above the band

The deltas below are arithmetic on named sources rather than estimates of our own — midpoint gaps between published sector bands, percentile gaps inside the BLS distribution, and year-over-year movement in the OEWS series. They are the levers that actually separate a $110,000 offer from a $150,000 one on the same job title.

Two of these stack cleanly and two do not. Metro and sector compound — a life-science fit-out PM in the Bay Area is drawing on both premiums at once — while the percentile premium for occupied-building and fast-track work is largely a description of where those same people already sit in the distribution. The escalation number is the one to watch on a renewal: at +7.5% on the median, a base set in mid-2024 and never revisited is now materially behind market, and Amtec’s split shows construction managers pulling away from the field-supervisor and estimating populations rather than moving with them.

Interiors PM pay by metro

All medians below are BLS OEWS May 2025 for construction managers (SOC 11-9021) in the named metropolitan area, released 15 May 2026. They cover the whole occupation, not TI alone, so read them as the local ceiling-and-floor a fit-out offer has to sit inside rather than as an interiors-specific number.

The spread from Dallas-Fort Worth to San Francisco is about $62,000 on the median — roughly 60% — which is wider than the gap between an assistant PM and a senior PM in most single markets. It also runs the other way on cost of living, and The Birmingham Group’s regional PM bands (West Coast $140k-$165k, Northeast $135k-$155k, Texas and Florida $110k-$140k, Midwest $105k-$125k, Southeast $95k-$120k) track the BLS ordering closely enough to use as a cross-check when you are calibrating an offer across offices.

Owner and occupier side versus GC side

Interiors PMs sit on one of two payrolls, and the ladders are shaped differently. On the GC and interiors-contractor side, pay tracks the BLS construction-manager distribution and the recruiter ladder above it: $95k-$140k for a working PM, $135k-$185k senior, $175k-$250k at project executive, with bonus tied to job margin. On the owner, occupier and CRE-services side — corporate real estate teams, and project and development services groups at the big brokerages — the posted numbers land lower. JLL’s pay-transparency listing for a Project Manager, Corporate Interiors in New York was $100,000-$140,000, against a $158,000 BLS median for construction managers in that same metro.

Third-party reads on CBRE point the same way: Levels.fyi shows Project Manager compensation at CBRE running from about $111,000 to $188,000+ across levels, Indeed’s employer average for the title is roughly $103,700, and Comparably estimates about $118,000 total on a $108,000 base. Glassdoor’s U.S. median total pay tells a compressed version of the same story, with construction project manager near $110,000 and real estate project manager near $104,000. These are self-reported aggregator estimates rather than survey data, so treat them as directional — but the direction is consistent.

What the owner side buys instead of base is portfolio: multi-site program work, a standards role that touches every location, predictable hours, and equity or RSU components that aggregators rarely capture. What the GC side buys is upside — margin bonus on fast-turn TI work, and a project-executive rung that scales with signed volume rather than headcount. Candidates crossing between them almost always negotiate against the wrong benchmark, and both sides lose good people to that mismatch.

Reading these numbers when you are staffing an interiors program

Three practical uses. First, calibrate the level, not the title: an interiors ‘project manager’ running eight concurrent floors is doing senior-PM work on the BLS distribution, and pricing the offer off a $114,990 median will lose the search. Second, price the premium you are actually asking for — occupied-building phasing, MEP-heavy scope and fast-track schedules all sit in the 75th percentile band at $151,640 and above, not at the median. Third, budget the whole package: the recruiter guides put total comp 25-35% or more above base, and an offer benchmarked on base alone understates the market by roughly a third.

iRecruit builds construction search capability across the interiors stack — project engineer and assistant PM through TI project manager, senior PM, project executive, superintendent and preconstruction or estimating leads — on both the GC side and the owner and occupier side. We are assembling that network market by market rather than claiming coverage we have not built, and we work from public wage data like the figures above when we help a hiring team set a band. If you are scoping an interiors program for 2026 and want the pay ladder pressure-tested before you post, that is a conversation worth having early.

For the hiring side of this market, see the Commercial Fit-Out practice.