General and Operations Manager Salary in Texas: Pay by Experience, City & Take-Home

A general and operations manager in Texas earns a median salary of $103,230 per year, or about $49.63 an hour, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025). Pay runs from roughly $46,190 at the 10th percentile to $264,620 at the 90th, so where you land depends heavily on experience, industry, and which Texas metro you work in. Texas has no state income tax, which lifts your take-home above most states.

How Texas pay compares to the national figure

The national median for general and operations managers is $105,770 a year, per the BLS (2025). Texas sits just below that at $103,230, a gap of $2,540, or about 2.4 percent under the U.S. median. That’s close enough to call Texas an average-pay state on the headline number, but the gross figure tells only half the story.

Texas levies no state income tax. In states like California or New York, a manager earning the same gross salary hands several thousand dollars a year to the state. So even when the Texas gross is a hair below the national median, the money that actually reaches a Texas bank account often beats higher-paying states once tax is settled. We put exact dollar figures on that in the take-home section below.

One more thing the median hides: the spread in Texas is wide. The 25th percentile sits at $64,470 and the 75th at $168,510. That $104,040 gap between the lower and upper quartile is large for any single job title, and it reflects how much the “general and operations manager” label covers, from a shift supervisor running a single store to an executive overseeing a regional operation.

With 431,310 people employed in this role across the state, Texas is one of the largest employers of operations managers in the country. That scale matters when you negotiate: there are a lot of seats, a lot of turnover, and a lot of competing employers willing to bid for a proven operator.

It’s also worth separating the median from the mean. The Texas mean (average) annual wage is $133,280, which sits $30,050 above the $103,230 median. When the average runs that far ahead of the midpoint, it tells you the distribution is skewed by high earners at the top, the people clustered toward that $264,620 90th-percentile figure. For a typical worker deciding what to expect, the median is the honest number, and the mean is best read as evidence of how much headroom exists above it. Most national salary pages quote one or the other without explaining the gap; the gap itself is the useful signal here.

General and operations manager pay by experience in Texas

Experience is the single biggest lever on this number. The BLS percentile breakdown is the cleanest proxy for a career arc, because pay in this role tracks scope and tenure tightly. Here is how the Texas figures map onto career stages.

The jump from early career to median is steep. Moving from the 25th percentile ($64,470) to the 50th ($103,230) is a $38,760 raise, and it usually comes from taking on a full profit-and-loss responsibility rather than running a single function. The next leg, median to the 75th percentile, adds another $65,280. That’s the payoff for managing multi-site operations, larger teams, or a higher-margin industry.

The top of the range is where this title starts to overlap with executive pay. At the 90th percentile, $264,620, you are usually looking at a senior operations leader at a large employer, often with a bonus structure layered on top of base. The BLS figure captures base wages, so real total compensation at that level can run higher once incentives are included.

The practical takeaway: early-career managers in Texas should benchmark against $64,470 to $103,230, treat the median as the target for a fully accountable operations role, and use the $168,510 experienced mark as the goalpost for multi-site or regional scope.

It helps to translate these into hourly terms, since some operations roles are still paid hourly. The 10th-percentile salary of $46,190 works out to roughly $22.21 an hour for a standard full-time year, the median of $103,230 to about $49.63, and the experienced $168,510 to roughly $81.01. The senior 90th-percentile figure of $264,620 lands near $127.22 an hour. Seeing the hourly equivalents makes the percentile jumps concrete: each step up the ladder is worth tens of dollars an hour, not a few cents, which is why moving from the median to the 75th percentile is worth chasing deliberately rather than waiting for it to arrive.

General and operations manager salary by Texas metro

Where you work inside Texas changes the number more than most people expect. The five largest metro areas span a median range of nearly $42,000, from El Paso at the bottom to Houston at the top. Here is the BLS (2025) breakdown for the largest Texas metros by employment.

Houston pays the highest median at $119,600, helped by its energy, petrochemical, and logistics base, where operations roles carry heavy budgets. Austin is right behind at $117,850, driven by its tech and corporate-headquarters concentration. Both sit more than $14,000 above the statewide median.

Dallas-Fort Worth has the largest headcount in the state at 125,090 employed managers, with a median of $111,010. If you want the deepest job market with the most employers competing, DFW is it. San Antonio comes in slightly under the state median at $99,790, and El Paso sits well below at $77,770, a $25,460 gap from the statewide figure. El Paso’s lower median tracks its lower cost of living, so the gap on paper overstates the gap in spending power.

A note on reading these numbers: a higher metro median is worth more only after you net out local housing. Austin’s median beats San Antonio’s by about $18,060, but Austin housing costs more, so the real difference in what’s left over is narrower than the salary line suggests.

The employment counts deserve attention too, because they tell you how easy it is to find work and switch jobs in each metro. Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston together hold 222,410 of the state’s operations-manager jobs, more than half the statewide total of 431,310. Austin adds 42,190 and San Antonio 30,560. El Paso, at 7,850 jobs, is a much thinner market, so even though its median is the lowest, a strong operator there may face less internal competition for the senior seats that exist. The pattern across these five metros is consistent: the deeper the job market, the higher the median tends to run, because dense markets mean more employers bidding for the same talent.

Take-home pay after tax in Texas

Gross salary is the headline; take-home is what you live on. Because Texas has no state income tax, the only mandatory withholdings on a Texas paycheck are federal income tax and FICA (Social Security and Medicare). The table below runs all four career-stage figures through 2026 federal and FICA rates for a single filer taking the standard deduction.

At the median salary of $103,230, a single Texas filer keeps about $81,008 a year, or roughly $6,751 a month, after federal tax and FICA. The effective tax rate at that level is about 21.5 percent. The entry-level effective rate is lower at about 15.2 percent, and the senior rate climbs to about 27.3 percent as more income falls into higher federal brackets. The state-tax column stays at $0 across the board, which is the whole advantage of working in Texas.

Here is the cross-state comparison that makes Texas stand out. Take the Texas median earner keeping $81,008 net. The same $103,230 gross earned in California, a high-tax state, leaves about $75,381 after that state’s income tax is layered on top of the identical federal and FICA bill. That’s a difference of $5,627 a year staying in a Texas worker’s pocket for the exact same gross salary. Over a decade at the median, that gap alone exceeds $56,000, before any raises. For a senior manager near $264,620, the no-income-tax advantage scales up further, since California’s top brackets bite hardest at high incomes.

The number that actually matters is net pay minus local housing. A $6,751 monthly take-home in El Paso, where housing is cheap, buys a very different life than the same take-home in central Austin. Always run your specific salary, filing status, and metro through a calculator before you compare two offers. You can do that with the Texas paycheck calculator. If you want to model deductions, a side income, or a spouse’s wages, a tool like TurboTax will estimate your full federal liability before you file.

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How to earn more as an operations manager in Texas

The pay range in this role is wide enough that deliberate moves can add real money. Here are the levers that actually shift the number in Texas, ranked by impact.

• Move toward Houston, Austin, or Dallas-Fort Worth. The metro premium is real. Houston’s median runs $16,370 above the state figure and Austin’s $14,620 above it. If you’re in a lower-paying metro and open to relocation, that’s the fastest structural raise available.
• Target a higher-paying industry. Energy, logistics, and tech operations carry larger budgets and pay accordingly. Moving from a single-site retail or hospitality operation into industrial or corporate operations is often what separates a 25th-percentile salary from a median or 75th-percentile one.
• Take full profit-and-loss ownership. The biggest single jump in the percentile data, $38,760 from the 25th to the 50th, tracks the shift from running a function to owning the bottom line. Volunteer for budget responsibility and you build the case for that pay band.
• Earn a recognized operations credential. A Project Management Professional (PMP), a Lean Six Sigma certification, or an operations or supply-chain certificate signals readiness for multi-site scope. You can pick up many of these through online programs such as Coursera, which carries operations and project-management courses from universities and companies.
• Move to multi-site or regional scope. The $65,280 step from the median to the 75th percentile is mostly about span of control. Managing several locations, larger teams, or a regional P&L is the clearest path into the $168,510 experienced band.
• Benchmark and negotiate every offer. With 431,310 of these jobs in Texas, you have negotiating strength that workers in thinner markets don’t. Come in with the metro median for your area and the percentile data, and ask for the band your scope justifies.

One framing that helps in negotiation: anchor to the right percentile, not the median, when your scope warrants it. If you already run multiple sites or carry a real P&L, the median of $103,230 is the floor of your conversation, not the target. The 75th-percentile figure of $168,510 is the defensible ask, and you support it with the specific scope you own. Conversely, if you’re moving into your first fully accountable role, the median is a fair landing spot and the $64,470 early-career number is what you’re moving up from. Knowing which of these five numbers describes your actual job is most of the battle, because it stops you from accepting a band a tier below your responsibility.

Job outlook for operations managers in Texas

The clearest signal in the data is sheer scale. Texas employs 431,310 general and operations managers, one of the deepest pools of this role in the United States. Dallas-Fort Worth alone accounts for 125,090 of those jobs and Houston another 97,320. A market that large turns over constantly, which means steady openings across experience levels and industries.

General and operations management is also one of the broadest occupational categories the BLS tracks, spanning nearly every industry from manufacturing to healthcare to retail. That breadth cushions the role against any single sector’s downturn, because operations talent transfers across industries. If you want to gauge live demand and current postings in your metro, a job board such as ZipRecruiter shows what Texas employers are paying right now.

For people deciding where in Texas to build a career, the data points one way. The three big metros, Houston, Austin, and Dallas-Fort Worth, combine high medians with deep job markets: 264,600 of the state’s operations-management jobs sit in those three areas alone. That concentration means more lateral moves, more counteroffers, and more chances to step up in scope without leaving the metro. Smaller markets like El Paso offer a lower median of $77,770 and fewer seats at 7,850 jobs, but they also come with lower living costs, so the right choice depends on whether you optimize for ceiling or for cost. Either way, the role itself is a stable, transferable one in a state that employs more than 431,000 of them.

Related and higher-paying roles in Texas

If you’re weighing this role against adjacent management jobs, two related Texas titles pay meaningfully more at the median. Both involve a narrower functional focus than general operations, and both sit above the $103,230 general-manager median in Texas.

A marketing manager in Texas earns about $44,650 more than a general and operations manager at the median, and a sales manager earns about $32,790 more. If your skills lean toward demand generation or revenue, those tracks pay a premium here. That said, general operations roles exist in far greater number, so the trade is a higher median against a deeper, more transferable job market.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025; federal income tax and FICA rates, tax year 2026. Take-home figures are estimates for a single filer taking the standard deduction. Last updated 2026. See our methodology.