What executive operations roles advertise, and how many won't say

The finding worth quoting

Roughly one in three executive operations postings across the 23 sources we track still doesn't publish pay. The July 31, 2026 refresh kept 471 postings after dropping those out of scope or expired. Of them, 152 published no pay figure an automated read could reach and 319 published one. Of the publishers, 51 advertised a midpoint below $100,000, so 268 reached the board.

One limit: an automated read can't tell a posting that publishes nothing from one that publishes pay out of reach, so treat non-disclosure as an upper bound. What it does capture is what a candidate sees before applying.

---

Read this before you quote a median

Every median below describes the top slice of this market, not the market. A posting reaches this board only when the source published a pay figure whose annualized midpoint is at least $100,000. Postings whose source published no pay are excluded entirely, and nothing is estimated. So the median advertised midpoint of $155,000 below is the median of postings that had already cleared $100,000.

It isn't the median executive assistant salary in the United States and shouldn't be quoted as one. For an all-employer figure, use the BLS occupational wage data. These are also advertised ranges, not paid compensation. A posted band of $140,000 to $180,000 says what the employer put in public, not where the person hired landed inside it.

---

Methodology

• Sample. 268 live postings on the Exec Ops Brief roles board, snapshot dated 2026-07-31, refreshed 07:15 AM Pacific. 258 salaried, 10 hourly, 23 sources across the four publisher types broken out below.
• How postings get in. The board isn't hand-picked. 21 of its 24 sources are read automatically every morning at 7:00 AM, and admission is a pay floor enforced in code rather than a judgment call. Three low-volume sources can't be read automatically and are entered by hand.
• What's counted. The midpoint of the advertised range for the 258 salaried postings, where midpoint is (low + high) / 2 and a single published figure is its own midpoint. The median leads because the tail is long, with a mean of $168,368.
• What's excluded. Any posting whose source published no pay figure, and any whose midpoint falls under $100,000. Hourly postings stay out of every salary statistic.
• Hourly. An hourly rate is annualized at 2,080 hours only to apply the floor test. It's never displayed as a salary or mixed into one.
• Thresholds. Any cut under 15 postings is labeled and isn't a finding. A 95 percent bootstrap interval describes sampling noise inside this snapshot, and no interval fixes a sample selected this way.
• Reproducibility. Every figure comes from one script, salary_report.py, reading the public roles.json the board serves. Run it on a later snapshot and every number regenerates.

---

What these postings advertise

Median 95 percent bootstrap interval: $147,500 to $162,500. The minimum is exactly $100,000 because that's the floor, not because the market stops there.

The board isn't crowded against its own floor. 18 postings (7.0 percent) carry a midpoint at or under $110,000 and 50 (19.4 percent) at or under $125,000, while 64 (24.8 percent) sit at or above $200,000 and 24 (9.3 percent) at or above $250,000.

The bands themselves are wide. The median advertised range runs $40,000, or 24 percent of its own midpoint, and a quarter span more than a third of it. The distance inside one advertised range is often larger than the distance between two role families, which is worth remembering before you anchor to anyone's midpoint, ours included.

Chief of staff postings advertise $62,500 more than executive assistant postings

Advertised range midpoints, 2026-07-31. One COO-level posting is left out for the same reason.

The chief of staff to executive assistant gap is $62,500 at the median, or 45.5 percent, and the two intervals don't overlap, which makes it the firmest comparison here. Executive operations sits $56,750 above executive assistant, but on 28 postings, so read that as direction rather than size.

What the table can't settle is whether the gap is the work or the market. Chief of staff postings here skew toward venture-backed companies, executive assistant postings toward search firms placing into finance and family offices. Pinning it on the title alone would be a stretch.

Geography moves executive assistant pay more than it moves chief of staff pay

Bay Area postings run a $160,000 median (n=106) against $145,000 in the New York metro (n=77), and the interesting part is inside the role families. Executive assistant postings run $145,000 in the Bay Area (n=65) against $135,000 in New York (n=47). Chief of staff postings run $201,750 in the Bay Area (n=24) against $200,000 in New York (n=20), which is no gap worth naming.

Both carry a warning. The executive assistant intervals overlap ($135,000 to $155,000 against $129,388 to $140,000), and the chief of staff cut rests on about 20 postings a city. So the Bay Area premium sitting in executive support rather than chief of staff work is a hypothesis worth testing on a larger sample, not yet a number.

Who published the posting moves the number too

Firm-level medians mostly sit under 15 postings each and are left out on purpose.

Part of that spread is role mix, since portfolio feeds carry more chief of staff work, and part is a real difference in what these channels place. The defensible reading is that the channel you search through shapes the pay you see.

What postings disclose besides pay

These are disclosure rates, the share of postings that state the benefit. A posting that doesn't mention a 401(k) may well offer one. Of 258 salaried postings, equity is stated in 163 (63.2 percent), health coverage in 118 (45.7 percent), paid time off in 102 (39.5 percent), a 401(k) in 99 (38.4 percent), a bonus in 60 (23.3 percent), and parental leave in 59 (22.9 percent). 50 list none at all.

Equity disclosure tracks role family: executive operations 85.7 percent (n=28), chief of staff 61.5 percent (n=78), executive assistant 59.4 percent (n=143). That last figure surprises people. Above a $100,000 midpoint, executive support postings mention equity more often than not.

---

What this data can't tell you

• Company stage. Stage isn't a field on this board. Only 14 of the 258 salaried postings state a stage in their own words, and one of those states more than one. That count is all this report will publish. No stage median appears at any sample size, because a stage read out of prose describes a posting's wording, not a verified company attribute.
• Whether pay is rising or falling. This is one snapshot. The board keeps daily history, but its source list and taxonomy changed over that period, so comparing snapshots would measure our own pipeline as much as the market.
• What anyone is actually paid. No offer or salary record is involved, and where equity or a bonus is mentioned, this counts the mention rather than valuing it.
• Small cells and freshness. Director / VP of Operations (n=8) and the 10 hourly postings (median rate $66.00 an hour) are printed for completeness, not as findings. The median dated posting is 19 days old, but 31 are older than 90 days, since some feeds keep listings up after a search closes.

---

How to cite this

The Exec Ops Brief, "Exec Ops Salary Transparency Report, Volume 1," figures as of July 31, 2026. Based on 268 executive operations postings that published compensation with a midpoint of at least $100,000. https://execopsbrief.com/salary-report

When you quote a figure, carry the n, the as-of date, and the note that these are advertised midpoints above a $100,000 floor. Journalists and researchers who want the snapshot, or a cut we didn't publish, can email hello@execopsbrief.com.