High & Low MBA Salaries And Bonuses At The Top 100 B-Schools

Fortunately, there’s a cure. Nothing breaks the spell faster than a juicy seven-figure number.

In the mountain of salary and bonus stats released in conjunction with, two graduates of .

$1 million is a special number, a pinnacle rarely reached but always dreamed of by elite MBA students, and it’s no surprise to see someone from Harvard reach it. Yet Harvard did not corner the market on flashy numbers in 2022. Six schools reported high U.S. salaries of $300K or more, and four reported the same for foreign graduates. Bonuses of the eyebrow-raising variety were abundant as well. One international student at Hawaii Manoa Shidler College of Business — a school with 14 total students in its latest MBA class — reported a $200K sign-on bonus, and a graduate at Michigan State Broad College of Business reported a bonus of $107K. The latter student was, again, a non-U.S. citizen.

IN 2022, 19 SCHOOLS IN THE TOP 25 REPORTED TOTAL PAY OVER $170K

Each spring, the publication of U.S. News‘ ranking and the data the magazine spends a year collecting offer an opportunity to examine in granular detail the highs and lows of MBA pay. Overall this year — once you overcome data satiation — the picture is fairly clear: The starting salary, sign-on bonus, and total pay numbers are up, in some cases way up, reinforcing once again the consistency of the MBA’s value proposition.

, 19 had total pay over $170K in 2022, all of them in the top 25. That’s up from just six schools last year. Fourteen schools have total MBA pay averages over $180K.

P&Q calculates total pay by taking the average salary and multiplying it by 100, adding that to the average sign-on bonus multiplied by the percentage of students reporting that they received it, then dividing the whole thing by 100., the B-school with the highest overall pay has been outside the top 10: NYU Stern, where graduates in 2021 earned an average of $178,182, up 1.7% from Stern’s 2020 MBA class. This year, however, powered by some gaudy numbers, Harvard overtook both Stern and Stanford to post the highest base pay: $194,723, topping GSB by a little over $1K and NYU by about $3K.

AVERAGE MBA SALARY AT A TOP-10 SCHOOL GREW MORE THAN 10% IN 2022

Notable overall pay growth occurred at several top-10 schools year-over-year from 2021 to 2022. Harvard's grew $25,708 (15.2%); Dartmouth Tuck School of Business saw an $19,742 increase (11.8%) to $186,690, and Stanford saw a $20,189 (11.7%) jump to $193,388. Since 2018, total MBA pay for graduates of Chicago Booth School off Business has grown more than 23%, to $191,177; HBS and Northwestern Kellogg School of Management grew more than 22%, the latter to $185,873. NYU Stern, the non-top-10 school most often rubbing shoulders with the elites in terms of pay, saw its base pay grow more than 20% in the last five years, to $191,768.

Salary and bonus growth were big for the top 10 in 2022. The average MBA salary at a top 10 school grew by more than 10% to $163,327 from $147,925, and the average bonus grew by 4.6% to $35,760 from $34,176. Reporting has been better in the top 10, too, with the average percentage of graduates who report salaries growing to 83.8% from 82.6% and the average reporting bonuses growing to 63.2% from 60.2%. See the next pages for tables including all the salary, bonus and reporting data; see.

Once you start looking at high and low salaries, the top 10 B-schools are not longer the whole story. Across the 100 schools in P&Q's ranking, HBS set the 2022 mark for highest "high" salary with the aforementioned $1 million finance grad, but USC Marshall School of Business reported the highest "low" MBA salary, $138,000 for an international grad, and NYU Stern had the highest low for a U.S. grad at $115K.

Interestingly, 17 B-schools reported higher "high" foreign than U.S. salaries, while 20 reported higher foreign salary "lows". Thirty schools reported higher foreign salary averages.