IT Director vs IT Manager Salary: A $28,250 Gap on H-1B Filings That Falls to 3% at the Same Level and Metro

IT director vs IT manager salary, as of the newest Labor Department file (decisions through June 30, 2026): IT director titles carry a $200,250 median base offer and IT manager titles $172,000, a $28,250 gap (95% interval $14,099 to $37,537). At the same wage level and metro it shrinks to 3.0%. At the same employer as well, it is 9.1%.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics cannot settle this question, because both titles sit in one occupation, SOC 11-3021 (computer and information systems managers). Its May 2025 median for the whole code is $175,140, and it counts 670,570 jobs. So we read the job title on all 3,119,855 H-1B Labor Condition Applications in 21 quarterly Labor Department files and split the code by what employers wrote in the title box. Every figure here is a base wage offered on a visa filing: H-1B only, no bonus or equity, and an offer rather than a paid wage.

What is inside SOC 11-3021, and how thin the two titles are

Only 1.7% of the 64,922 certified full-time filings in the code (October 2020 to June 2026) carry an IT director title, counting 154 associate directors, and 3.3% carry an IT manager title. The largest group is software and engineering management, with 24,170 filings at a $200,000 median. That is why a code-level figure says little about a general IT manager at a hospital or a distributor. Named IT managers ($153,141 across all years) sit below the BLS median, and named IT directors ($184,560) sit just above it.

Source: DOL OFLC LCA Disclosure Data, FY2021 to FY2026 Q3, certified full-time H-1B, SOC 11-3021; BLS OEWS May 2025. Offers are not adjusted for inflation across years. Hover for counts.

How far apart are the offers?

The two distributions overlap heavily. 19.5% of IT manager offers beat the IT director median of $200,250, and 25.6% of IT director offers fall below the IT manager median of $172,000. The top Google result, a Reddit r/sysadmin thread, says managers in a medium cost-of-living area earn about $110K to $160K and directors about $150K to $250K. On these filings 37% of IT manager offers land in that manager band, so it reads low for this sample, and 76% of IT director offers land in the director band.

Source: DOL LCA filings decided July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026. Bars show each title’s own share of offers, because IT manager filings outnumber IT director filings about two to one. Associate directors are excluded here.

Does the title gap hold at the same level, metro and employer?

Partly, and which control you choose changes the answer. Pooling all years with a stated wage level (2,558 filings, 1,183 employers), director titles pay 17.3% more in the same fiscal year. Matching the DOL wage level cuts that to 7.2%. Adding the metro cuts it to 3.0% (interval 1.3% to 4.8%). But comparing inside one employer pushes it back up: 22.4% at the same employer, 12.9% at the same employer and level, and 9.1% with the metro as well.

Source: our regressions on DOL LCA filings, log of the offered base wage on a director flag plus fiscal year and the factors named, intervals clustered on employer. Within-employer rows are identified by the 99 employers that filed both titles.

Two readings follow from the numbers. First, wage level does much of the work because employers rate these jobs differently: 34.4% of IT director filings are Level IV against 9.0% of IT manager filings, and 7.2% against 14.1% at Level I. Level is the employer’s own rating of the job, so matching on it removes part of what a promotion is, and the 3.0% should be read as a floor. Second, the same-employer gap is larger than the same-metro gap, which means that at a given level and metro, director filings come more often from lower-paying employers than manager filings do. The title also buys different things by employer type. At consulting and staffing firms a director title adds 1.3% at the same level (interval -2.3% to 5.1%, not distinguishable from zero), against 11.0% at end-customer employers (7.7% to 14.4%).

Employer type uses a name list, then the NAICS code on the filing, as on our cloud architect vs cloud engineer report. All fiscal years pooled.

All fiscal years. Filings with no stated level (96 director, 448 manager) are left out. The two Level I medians match by chance: 6 named IT filings sit at exactly that figure. 82% of the 67 Level I director filings come from employers with under 100 H-1B filings.

Employer size: the gap grows with filing volume

Filings have no headcount field, so we use a stand-in: the employer’s total certified H-1B filings across all job titles from October 2020 to June 2026. That measures H-1B use, not staff, and it can rank a mid-size outsourcer above a far bigger bank. With that warning, the median gap climbs from $20,567 at employers with under 10 filings to $45,578 at those with 1,000 or more. Most of the rise comes from directors: their median goes from $160,000 to $200,000, while managers move from $139,433 to $154,422. Two top-ranking guides publish headcount bands with no source (one lists $110,000 to $150,000 under 250 employees), and these filings cannot test them.

All fiscal years pooled, nominal dollars. Intervals resample employers. Size band is a proxy for H-1B use, not employee count.

Every employer that filed both titles

99 employers filed both titles, which gives the cleanest comparison available. 90 offered directors the higher median, 9 offered managers the higher median, and the typical difference is $34,810. Most cells are tiny, so among the 22 employers with at least three filings of each title, 21 favor directors, with a median difference of $38,405. Click a heading to sort, or filter by size band.

Source: DOL LCA filings, October 2020 to June 2026. Employer spellings are merged by a printed name rule, so unusual legal names may stay separate. Medians from one or two filings are anecdotes, not rates.

Where the titles sit in the IT hierarchy

People Also Ask wants the order of IT job titles. Pay gives a rough order, with one surprise: CIO and CTO titles have a median of only $200,000, close to plain directors at $199,000 and below senior directors at $225,000. The filings alone do not show why, and the wide spread ($161,315 to $250,000 in the middle half) warns against reading the title as a rung. Among named IT titles, associate directors ($183,182, 154 filings) sit level with directors ($180,461, 823 filings). A senior IT manager ($165,032) earns less than an IT director, and a senior IT director reaches $210,000 on just 113 filings.

Source: DOL LCA filings, SOC 11-3021, October 2020 to June 2026, first matching rung in the title. Pay order, not reporting line.

Is the gap changing? Year by year, and the newest filings

Not in any clear direction. The gap was $31,107 in FY2021 and $30,255 in the first three quarters of FY2026. FY2024 ($18,450) has an interval that includes zero, so a single year can mislead. Since FY2021 both medians rose: directors from $172,256 to $203,729, managers from $141,149 to $173,474.

Newest six filings for each title in FY2026 Q3, the latest file on the DOL page at the time of writing. Rerunning fetch_dm.py on the next quarterly file refreshes both tables.

Metro and state differences

Metro detail has to pool all years, and even then only 13 metros reach 20 filings of each title. California shows a $215,000 director median and $175,000 manager median, against $175,390 and $147,000 in Texas, and $200,000 and $175,121 in New York. Related searches ask about Colorado Springs: there are 7 IT manager filings and no IT director filings there, too few to publish a gap.

Source: DOL LCA filings pooled October 2020 to June 2026, nominal; BLS OEWS May 2025 metro file. Metro comes from worksite county, with ZIP as a fallback. For the whole-code picture by state and industry, see our IT manager salary report.

How this compares with the pages ranking for this query

Read November 2026. These sources mix base pay, bonus and modeled pay, so differences are not all errors. None of the ones we could read splits one dataset by both titles and states a sample size.

What this means for MSPs: vCIO and fractional director pricing

TestedFederal price lists are the one public check we found. In GSA’s CALC+ ceiling rates (4,056 manager-type rates pulled, filtered to the IT category), IT director labor categories have a $221.16 median across only 44 rates, IT manager categories $161.43 across 625, and small-business schedule holders $209.76 for directors (32 rates). Two rates are named as a virtual CIO: $164.07 and $188.85. Federal buyers therefore see a director premium of 37% over a manager, wider than the 16% in these wage offers. These are ceilings on federal contracts, not commercial prices.

TestedDirect cost is the floor for a fractional price. BLS says wages are 69.5% of compensation in professional and business services (June 2026). Applied to the medians here, that puts an employed IT director at about $138.52 an hour and an IT manager at about $118.98, before overhead, bench time, tools and margin. The GSA director median is 1.60 times that direct cost, and the manager median 1.36 times.

TestedThe MSP code itself is too thin to give a separate answer. NAICS 541513 (computer facilities management, the closest code to MSPs) has 4 IT manager filings and 0 IT director filings. All of NAICS 5415 shows 226 director filings at $161,058 and 572 manager filings at $147,145, and many of those employers are outsourcers rather than MSPs.

Advice, not dataWe have no dataset of commercial vCIO prices, so none of this is measured. Use the $138.52 direct cost as your floor when quoting vCIO hours, and treat the $221.16 federal ceiling as a sense check rather than a market rate. Sixteen hours a month at those two rates is $2,216 and $3,538. If a client’s IT lead is a manager asking for a director title, the consulting-firm result above suggests the title alone may not move pay at the same job rating, so tie the title to a higher-rated scope. Our managed IT services pricing guide covers how such hours fit into a monthly contract.

Questions people ask

What is the difference between an IT director and an IT manager?

In pay, IT director titles carry a $200,250 median base offer and IT manager titles $172,000 on H-1B filings decided in the year to June 30, 2026. Employers also rate the jobs differently: 34.4% of IT director filings are at DOL wage Level IV, against 9.0% of IT manager filings. Filings do not list duties, so differences in scope cannot be read from this data.

Is it better to be a manager or a director in IT?

On base pay, a director title is worth more at the same employer: 12.9% more at the same wage level (95% interval 9.7% to 16.2%). It is not a guarantee: 19.5% of IT manager offers beat the IT director median, and 25.6% of IT director offers fall below the IT manager median. Bonus, equity, hours and stress are not in the data.

What is the hierarchy of IT job titles?

Across 64,922 filings in SOC 11-3021, medians run manager $175,837, associate director $180,107, senior manager $189,816, director $199,000, CIO or CTO $200,000, vice president $201,500, senior director $225,000. That is a pay order, not an org chart: it mixes small firms and large ones.

Does a director outrank a manager?

Inside one employer, almost always on pay. Of the 99 employers that filed both IT director and IT manager titles, 90 offered directors the higher median, 9 offered managers the higher median, and the median difference was $34,810. Across employers it is weaker: a director at a small firm can earn less than a manager at a large one.

What is the IT director vs IT manager salary per hour?

At 2,080 hours a year, the medians for the year to June 2026 work out to $96.27 an hour for IT director titles and $82.69 for IT manager titles, a gap of $13.58. BLS reports $84.20 an hour as the median for the whole code, which merges both titles.

What is the IT director vs IT manager salary in California?

Pooled from October 2020 to June 2026, California filings show a $215,000 median for IT director titles (170 filings) and $175,000 for IT manager titles (396 filings), against $175,390 and $147,000 in Texas.

Methodology and limits

References

1. U.S. Department of Labor, OFLC Performance Data: LCA Disclosure Data FY2021 to FY2026 Q3, with record layout. Accessed November 2026.
2. U.S. Department of Labor, Prevailing Wage Determination Policy Guidance (revised November 2009). Accessed November 2026.
3. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025 national and metro estimates, SOC 11-3021. Accessed November 2026.
4. BLS, 2018 SOC direct match title file. Accessed November 2026.
5. BLS, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026, Table 6. Accessed November 2026.
6. U.S. General Services Administration, CALC+ labor rates (API: api.gsa.gov/acquisition/calc/v3). Accessed November 2026.
7. Robert Half, IT Director salary (2027 Salary Guide). Accessed November 2026.
8. KORE1, IT Director Salary Guide 2026. Accessed November 2026.
9. My Personal Recruiter, IT Director Salary in 2026. Accessed November 2026.
10. Reddit r/sysadmin, Salary expectations: IT Manager vs. Director of IT (Google result snippet only). Accessed November 2026.
11. Indeed, Director vs. Senior Manager (Google result snippet only). Accessed November 2026.