What a Scrum Master does, and what it pays in 2026

A Scrum Master runs the working rhythm of a software team: the standup, the sprint planning, the retrospective, and the unglamorous work of removing whatever is blocking someone. O*NET files the title under Information Technology Project Managers, code 15-1299.09, where the median is $116,580 a year - $56.05 an hour - on May 2025 wage data. That number is the single most useful and most misleading figure in this post, and the reason why is worth two minutes.

Where the title sits in the data

"Scrum Master" is one of nine sample reported job titles O*NET lists for 15-1299.09. The others are Cloud Product Director, Cybersecurity Project Manager, Data Center Product Director, Information Systems Project Manager, IT Manager, IT Program Manager, IT Project Manager and Transition Program Manager. If you are searching job boards for scrum work, those are the strings that return the same postings.

Notice what is not on that list: Product Owner, Release Train Engineer, Delivery Lead, Agile Coach. O*NET's sample of reported job titles is drawn from what incumbents call themselves when surveyed, so a title's absence means it was not common enough in that sample to print - not that the job does not exist. It does mean the title has no wage row of its own anywhere in federal data, which is the practical consequence for anyone trying to research an offer.

The catch is the wage. O*NET's detailed occupations roll up to Standard Occupational Classification codes, and 15-1299.09 rolls into SOC 15-1299, "Computer Occupations, All Other". So does 15-1299.08, Computer Systems Engineers/Architects - a completely different job, whose sample titles are Solutions Architect, Systems Engineer and Web Architect. Both pages report the identical median: $116,580, and the identical employment figure, 472,000 as of 2024. That is not a coincidence, and it is not a Scrum Master salary. It is the midpoint of a bucket that holds solutions architects and scrum masters in the same tin.

Information Technology Project Managers (O*NET 15-1299.09)

$116,580Median annual wage, 2025

472,000Employed, 2024

31,300Projected job openings, 2024–34

What a Scrum Master is actually paid, next to the roles around them

How to read this. Every row is a median from the same May 2025 wage estimates, so the comparison is fair across rows. A median is the middle: half the people in that occupation earn less. It is not a starting salary, it is not what a posting will offer you, and it says nothing about your city. BLS has retired the per-occupation OES profile pages that used to carry a metro table - request oes151299.htm today and you land on the OEWS data-tables index instead. The metro estimates still exist inside the downloadable May 2025 OEWS files; what does not exist, in any of them, is a row labelled Scrum Master.

Here is the position that table supports, and you may not like it. The Scrum Master facilitating a team of software developers is, on the federal numbers, paid less than the people whose work they coordinate - $116,580 against a software developer median of $135,980 in May 2025, a gap of $19,400. Developers also stretch further at the top: BLS puts the highest-earning 10 percent of software developers above $214,670. The scrum role is not a step up from engineering. Treated as one, it is a pay cut with more meetings.

What the job consists of

O*NET rates work activities by importance on a 0–100 scale, and for Information Technology Project Managers the top-rated activity is "Coordinating the Work and Activities of Others" at 97 - the highest score on the profile. Communicating with supervisors, peers or subordinates follows at 93, getting information at 92, and organizing, planning and prioritizing work at 91. Working with computers sits at 88, below all of them.

The task list reads the same way: manage project execution to ensure adherence to budget, schedule and scope; confer with project personnel to identify and resolve problems; monitor or track project milestones and deliverables; submit project deliverables, ensuring adherence to quality standards; assess current or future customer needs and priorities.

On the skills side, critical thinking scores 78, then active listening, reading comprehension and writing at 75 each, and speaking at 72. There is no technical skill in the top five. A Scrum Master on a payments team spends the morning finding out why a card-processing story has sat in review for four days and the afternoon rewriting the acceptance criteria so it does not happen again - and both of those are on that list, in that order.

Writing at 75 is the score people underrate. Three of the five listed tasks - submitting deliverables against quality standards, tracking milestones, assessing customer needs and priorities - end in a written artifact somebody else has to act on without you in the room. An Agile Coach hired to fix delivery across four teams does not fix it by running better standups; they fix it by producing something a director can read on a Thursday and act on. If your resume for this role describes ceremonies rather than the documents and decisions that came out of them, it is describing the 88, not the 97.

Which agile titles federal data recognises

Sample reported job titles on O*NET occupation profiles, checked September 2026. A title absent from O*NET is still a real job - it is simply not indexed under that name.

	O*NET occupation it sits under	Status of the title
Scrum Master	15-1299.09 Information Technology Project Managers	Reported job title
IT Project Manager	15-1299.09 Information Technology Project Managers	Reported job title
IT Program Manager	15-1299.09 Information Technology Project Managers	Reported job title
Cybersecurity Project Manager	15-1299.09 Information Technology Project Managers	Reported job title
Business Analyst	13-1111.00 Management Analysts	Reported job title
Solutions Architect	15-1299.08 Computer Systems Engineers/Architects	Reported job title
Agile Coach	-	No O*NET occupation lists it

Is "Agile Coach" a real occupation?

Not in O*NET it is not. A search of the O*NET database for "agile coach" returns 48 occupations, none of which carries Agile Coach as a reported job title. The five it ranks highest, in order, are Animal Trainers, Coaches and Scouts, Bus Drivers, Instructional Coordinators, and Exercise Trainers and Group Fitness Instructors - which tells you the search is matching the word "coach" and nothing else. Employers post the title constantly. The federal occupational data has no row for it, which means any Agile Coach salary figure you find is drawn from private sources, not from BLS.

Which industry pays project work best

The nearest occupation with a published industry breakdown is Project Management Specialists (13-1082) - not the same code as a Scrum Master, but the closest published table, and the shape of it holds across project roles.

Median annual wage by industry, Project Management Specialists, May 2025

BLS publishes this industry table for 13-1082, not for the 15-1299 group a Scrum Master falls into. Use it for the shape of the spread, not as a Scrum Master figure.

Finance and insurance		$120,700
Professional, scientific, and technical services		$108,260
Manufacturing		$102,640
Administrative and support services		$98,890
Construction		$98,730

Finance and insurance sits $21,970 above construction across the same occupation and the same month of data. That is the industry premium, and it is larger than most people's expected raise from changing employer within an industry. A Scrum Master weighing two offers at the same title should look at the sector on the letterhead before the number on the offer.

The percentile spread for 13-1082 runs from below $61,580 at the 10th percentile to above $167,970 at the 90th, against a median of $102,320. That is a wide band for one occupation, and it is doing the work that a seniority column would do if BLS published one.

What a posting will ask you for

Education for Information Technology Project Managers is unusually mixed. O*NET's respondents report a bachelor's degree 38 percent of the time, an associate's or two-year degree 24 percent, and a post-baccalaureate certificate 19 percent. Compare that to Project Management Specialists, where 64 percent report a bachelor's, and Management Analysts, where 57 percent report a bachelor's and a further 24 percent a master's. Scrum work is one of the few technology-adjacent roles where the certificate path is a normal answer rather than a workaround.

The occupation is Job Zone Four, "considerable preparation needed", with a specific vocational preparation range of 7.0 to under 8.0 - roughly two to four years of related experience and training expected on top of whatever schooling you bring.

For tooling, O*NET splits its software list into two tiers, and the split matters. In-demand - the marker O*NET assigns from how often a technology is named in postings for the occupation - covers Atlassian JIRA, Atlassian Confluence, ServiceNow, SAP, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. Hot technologies, the wider tier, is where Docker, GitHub, Tableau and Slack sit. Kubernetes is not on the profile at all, in either tier, which is worth knowing before you put it in a skills section. You are not being hired to write container manifests. You are being hired to be the person who can read the board in JIRA and tell whether the sprint is going to land.

Where the job goes after Scrum Master

The obvious next rung is Computer and Information Systems Manager, SOC 11-3021 - the occupation whose sample titles are IT Director, IT Manager, Information Systems Manager and Application Development Director. BLS puts its median at $175,140 a year, or $84.20 an hour, in May 2025, with the lowest 10 percent under $107,550 and the highest 10 percent over $297,510. The typical entry requirement is a bachelor's degree plus five years or more of related work experience, which is roughly what a Scrum Master accumulates on the way through.

Two things about that jump are worth reading carefully. The first is the floor: the 10th percentile of the manager occupation, $107,550, sits below the $116,580 median of the group a Scrum Master falls into. Moving up a rung is not automatically a raise. The second is the industry effect again, and it is larger here - BLS reports a median of $200,510 for these managers in information, against $176,950 in management of companies and enterprises, a $23,560 spread across the same May 2025 estimates.

The parts nobody's data covers

Certification is the obvious gap. Neither BLS nor O*NET records whether a Scrum Master holds a CSM, a PSM or nothing at all, so there is no public figure for what a certification is worth in pay - which is why every number you see attached to one comes from a survey run by the body selling the certificate.

Team size is the second gap. A Scrum Master running one team of six and one running four teams of nine appear identically in every table above.

Location is the third, and it is half a gap rather than a whole one. The May 2025 OEWS release still carries metropolitan and nonmetropolitan estimates, so Austin against Boston is answerable - but only for 15-1299, Computer Occupations, All Other, the same tin that holds the solutions architects. There is no metro figure for a Scrum Master, and there never has been. Any city-by-city Scrum Master table you find in 2026 was built from job postings or from a vendor's own survey, and postings are advertised ranges rather than accepted offers. The two differ, and nobody publishes by how much.

Nothing above separates a contract Scrum Master from a permanent one either. Wage estimates cover employed workers; a day rate is a different animal.

The two projection vintages, and why they disagree

O*NET currently reports 2024–34 projections; the Occupational Outlook Handbook has moved to 2025–35. They are not comparable, and putting them in one sentence produces nonsense. Held apart, both are positive for this work: O*NET rates growth for 15-1299.09 as "much faster than average (7 percent or higher)" over 2024–34 with 31,300 projected openings, while the OOH projects Project Management Specialists growing 7 percent from 2025 to 2035, adding 73,200 jobs on a 2025 base of 1,094,300, with roughly 76,500 openings a year. On the same 2025–35 vintage, Computer and Information Systems Managers is projected to grow 16 percent, from 685,800 jobs to 793,900. Software developers are trickier to quote: BLS projects 10 percent growth for the bundle it calls software developers, quality assurance analysts and testers, 1,905,400 jobs in 2025 rising to 2,090,800, and software developers alone account for 1,717,800 of that 2025 base. There is no separate growth rate published for developers on their own, so anyone who gives you one has split a number BLS did not split.

Neither vintage tells you anything about scrum specifically. Both are projections for occupations that contain the work, made before whatever happens to team structures over the next decade.

If you are applying for this role

Search the title variants, not just "Scrum Master". IT Project Manager, IT Program Manager, Information Systems Project Manager and Transition Program Manager return overlapping postings, and O*NET lists all of them for the same occupation. Agile Coach is worth searching too, even though no federal occupation claims it.

Expect an offer anchored below $116,580 unless the sector is right. That median covers a group that includes solutions architects, so treat it as a ceiling on your reasonable expectation rather than a floor, and let the industry table set the rest - finance and insurance ran $120,700 for project management specialists in May 2025 against $98,730 in construction.

Ask one question in the screen: how many teams? It is the variable with the largest effect on the job that appears in none of the data above. Two teams is a full week. Four is a different job with the same title.

If you are applying to twenty of these at once and retyping the same JIRA and sprint-facilitation details into every form, HeroApply fills the application from your resume so the time goes into the screening call instead.