National Averages

• According to Indeed.com, the average salary of business managers nationwide was $70,000, as of April 2011. This number is based upon managers at all levels, regardless of experience or management level. PayScale.com indicates a more general range of pay from $39,209 to $73,883 in 2011. PayScale's information is based on surveys of 2,131 business managers nationwide. The discrepancy between the two is indicative of the difficulty in precisely defining the average income of business managers.
  
  

Higher-Level Management

• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average salary of general and operations managers nationwide was $110,550 in 2009. This is based on the pay of 1,689,680 managers nationwide that were employed in 2009. Average pay varied greatly by industry. For instance, those working for building equipment contractors averaged $110,600, while those in computer system designs and services made the highest average pay at $147,170. The highest-paid high-level managers were chief executive officers, who averaged $167,280 per year.
  
  

Experience

• One way to delineate between the average pay of different managers is to distinguish between the pay made by those with different levels of experience. PayScale indicates that the average range of pay for those with 20 or more years of experience was between $49,962 and $102,083. The top-end pay for those with 10 to 19 years of experience drops off sharply, with an average salary range of $46,079 to $81,009 per year. Business managers with five to nine years of experience made between $43,265 and $70,903, while those with fewer than five years of experience made $27,000 to $55,458.
  
  

Location

• Location seems to be less of a determining factor affecting the average pay of business managers, but it does have some bearing on the statistics. According to PayScale, the highest average salaries for business managers were in the states of California, New York and Texas, with the top-end of the average salary scale ranging from $84,082 to $95,561 per year. Pay in states like Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania and Virginia was much lower, at $65,325 to $77,712 per year in 2011.