S-Corp Reasonable Salary Benchmarks
An S corporation owner who works in the business must pay themselves a reasonable salary before taking distributions — what the company would have to pay somebody else to do the same work. That argument is won or lost on market wage evidence, and the evidence the IRS and the courts reach for is the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Below are 728 occupations across 16 groups, each page carrying the full 25th / median / 75th spread for every occupation in that group rather than a single headline number. Occupations whose median falls below $60,000 are marked rather than hidden: that is roughly where an S-corp election starts repaying its own overhead, and a reader comparing occupations is better served seeing where the line falls.
| Occupation group | Occupations | Median range |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture and Engineering | 36 | $54,240 – $161,740 |
| Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media | 36 | $37,360 – $114,850 |
| Business and Financial Operations | 32 | $52,230 – $117,330 |
| Community and Social Service | 17 | $45,280 – $71,900 |
| Computer and Mathematical | 21 | $61,860 – $140,300 |
| Construction and Extraction | 60 | $40,470 – $109,910 |
| Educational Instruction and Library | 64 | $36,780 – $128,500 |
| Healthcare Practitioners and Technical | 71 | $37,640 – $559,030 |
| Installation, Maintenance, and Repair | 51 | $37,710 – $103,020 |
| Life, Physical, and Social Science | 48 | $49,630 – $193,950 |
| Management | 37 | $59,300 – $213,990 |
| Office and Administrative Support | 54 | $35,070 – $76,590 |
| Production | 105 | $34,890 – $122,890 |
| Protective Service | 24 | $33,580 – $106,040 |
| Sales and Related | 22 | $32,880 – $124,900 |
| Transportation and Material Moving | 50 | $35,150 – $232,140 |
Why these groups and not others
BLS publishes 22 major occupation groups. Five are missing here — building and grounds cleaning, food preparation, personal care, farming, and healthcare support — because fewer than five of their occupations carry a median above the threshold. A page headed "S-corp reasonable salary benchmarks" for those groups would imply a relevance the data does not support.
Legal is missing for a different reason, and it is worth naming because lawyers are among the likeliest S-corp electors on this list. BLS publishes only eight legal occupations with a complete wage spread, which is too short a table to be a page: measured against the other groups, a legal page was substantially the same document as its siblings with a different eight rows in the middle. The reasonable-compensation case law for this profession is unusually rich, and the group earns a page when that content is written rather than on the strength of eight rows.
A percentile is evidence, not an answer, and none of this is tax advice. Reasonable compensation is a facts-and-circumstances test: hours worked, duties performed, and how much of the profit comes from your labour rather than from capital or other people's work. TheS-corp salary calculator models your own state, profit and hours.
Common questions
What is a reasonable salary for an S-corp owner?
What the company would have to pay somebody else to do the same work. There is no figure in law, so the argument is made on market wage evidence, and the evidence the IRS and the courts reach for is the Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data these pages are built from.
Why are occupations grouped rather than listed individually?
Because one occupation carries too little to support its own page: a wage band and little else. A group page carries every occupation in it with the full percentile spread, which is both more useful to compare against and genuinely different from the next group.