Consulting Pay Rose 25% as US Private Wages Rose 29%
BLS data shows the consulting wage premium narrowed from 1.63x to 1.58x since 2019, while Manhattan bucked the national trend toward smaller firms.
By Catherine Brewer
Consulting is supposed to be where the wage growth is. Between 2019 and 2024 it was not.
Average weekly pay in the American management, scientific and technical consulting sector rose 25.1 percent. Average weekly pay across all private industries rose 29.3 percent. The consulting wage premium, which stood at 1.63 times the private-sector average in the first quarter of 2019, had narrowed to 1.58 by the first quarter of 2024.
That is a small move, and it is the opposite direction from the one the industry's own narrative implies.
The premium, year by year
The figures come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which counts jobs covered by unemployment insurance rather than sampling them. Consulting is NAICS 5416, which the Census Bureau defines as management, scientific and technical consulting services; the comparison series is all private industry. All figures are first-quarter, private-ownership averages.
| Q1 | All private industries | Consulting | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | $1,197 | $1,952 | 1.63× |
| 2021 | $1,308 | $2,079 | 1.59× |
| 2023 | $1,486 | $2,364 | 1.59× |
| 2024 | $1,548 | $2,442 | 1.58× |
Source: BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, average weekly wage, private ownership, Q1 of each year. Consulting is NAICS 5416; all private industry is NAICS 10. Indexed to Q1 2019 = 100. Method: each series divided by its own Q1 2019 value.
Two caveats belong here rather than at the end, because they bound the claim.
The first is composition. Average wages across all private industry are sensitive to which jobs exist, and the 2020 to 2021 period removed and then restored a large number of low-wage service jobs. That distorts the middle of this series more than the endpoints, but it does not vanish from a 2019-to-2024 comparison.
The second is that a narrowing premium is not a falling wage. Consulting pay rose substantially in absolute terms, from $1,952 to $2,442 a week. A 1.58× premium remains a large one. The finding is about relative position, not about consultants doing badly.
Manhattan went the other way
The more interesting number is structural rather than monetary, and it runs against the national trend.
Nationally, the consulting sector has been fragmenting. Establishments grew 50.0 percent between 2019 and 2024 while employment grew 23.5 percent, which pulled average firm size down from 5.48 employees to 4.51, a fall of 17.7 percent.
New York County did the opposite. Manhattan consulting employment grew 21.0 percent while establishments grew 17.0 percent, and the average Manhattan consulting establishment grew from 12.10 employees to 12.51.
| 2019 | 2024 | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manhattan consulting jobs | 46,584 | 56,349 | +21.0% |
| Manhattan establishments | 3,850 | 4,503 | +17.0% |
| Employees per establishment | 12.10 | 12.51 | +3.4% |
| US employees per establishment | 5.48 | 4.51 | −17.7% |
A Manhattan consulting firm is now roughly 2.8 times the size of the average American one. While the national sector dispersed into small shops, the borough that houses the large advisory practices kept consolidating into larger ones.
Manhattan's own wage premium tells a related story. Consulting there paid $4,892 a week in 2024 against $4,303 for all private industry in the borough, a premium of just 1.14×, well below the national 1.58×. That is not because Manhattan consultants are underpaid. It is because the borough's private-sector average is itself inflated by finance, so consulting has less distance to travel above it.
What a two-speed sector means operationally
These two findings describe a sector splitting into two kinds of business with different problems.
The large Manhattan practice has a staffing pyramid. Analysts build the deliverable, associates check it, partners edit the argument. Deck production is distributed across people whose time is cheaper than the partner's, which is the entire economic logic of the pyramid.
The four-person firm that the national data is full of has no pyramid. The person who wins the work does the analysis and also formats the slides. That is why AI presentation software for consultants became a distinct product category rather than a feature of general presentation tools: its buyer is a principal deciding whether to spend an evening on layout, not a design department deciding on a vendor.
An ex-McKinsey consultant who tested five AI presentation tools against real client decks reached the conclusion most practitioner reviews reach: first-draft structure and layout are largely handled, and the judgment about what belongs on the slide is not.
The products competing for that buyer include Gamma, Prezi AI, SlidesAI, Alai, NextDocs, 2Slides, STORYD and Matik. The differentiators that matter to a small firm are unglamorous: whether the export is genuinely editable PowerPoint rather than a PDF, whether charts stay bound to the spreadsheet when the model is revised, whether the tool can match a client's template, and what the terms say about training on uploaded client material. The last of those is a confidentiality decision that small firms often make by default rather than deliberately.
What this does not establish
Five years of first-quarter data cannot separate a structural shift from an extended cyclical one. Independent consulting expands when corporate hiring tightens, and some of the national fragmentation is likely that mechanism rather than a permanent reorganisation of advisory work.
Establishment counts also include registered businesses that are not operating firms with staff, so the national growth in establishments overstates the growth in real consultancies. The employment series does not have this problem, since it counts payroll jobs.
The wage comparison is the most robust of the three findings here, because it compares two averages computed the same way from the same administrative source. Consulting pay grew, and it grew more slowly than the rest of the private economy.
Common questions
Are consultants paid less than they were? No. Average consulting pay rose from $1,952 to $2,442 a week. It rose more slowly than the private-sector average, which narrowed the premium.
Why is Manhattan's consulting premium so much smaller than the national one? Because Manhattan's all-industry private wage is unusually high, at $4,303 a week, largely due to finance. Consulting pay there is high in absolute terms but closer to its local baseline.
Is the consulting industry consolidating or fragmenting? Both, in different places. Nationally the average firm shrank 17.7 percent. In Manhattan it grew 3.4 percent.
Does NAICS 5416 mean strategy consulting? Not only. It also covers environmental, scientific and IT advisory services. BLS does not publish a strategy-consulting-only wage series at this geographic level.
Cover photograph: Financial District skyline, Manhattan, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.