- Senior-level salaries in the cannabis industry are soaring.
- There are 18 roles where workers can earn a six-figure salary in the industry.
- These roles span manufacturing, cultivation, sales, and even chemistry.
Senior-level salaries in the cannabis industry are soaring as the industry matures, according to cannabis recruiting startup Vangst’s 2021 salary guide.
Like other mature industries, bigger companies are able to pay higher salaries than their smaller counterparts. That means more talent is going to big companies known as multistate operators or MSOs.
“The larger, well-capitalized companies are able to pay much more competitively, which is why they’re gobbling up the good talent,” Vangst CEO Karson Humiston told Insider in an interview.
Vangst releases a salary guide each year. You can read Insider’s reporting on last year’s edition here.
Humiston said that cannabis salaries have edged upward year-over-year, especially as the industry emerges from the economic downturn associated with the coronavirus pandemic. Unlike in past years, more employers are looking for people with specific cannabis industry experience because the industry has now been legal for nearly a decade in some states, she said.
“It’s a steep learning curve,” Humiston said, and companies want workers who understand the unique complexities of working in cannabis and are able to hit the ground running.
To put together its salary guide, Vangst surveyed more than 1,000 employees at cannabis businesses across the US. The salary ranges in the slides below represent the minimum and maximum that employers pay workers in those positions. Generally speaking, larger companies pay higher salaries. For some roles, the salary was estimated with on-target earnings, which is the total expected pay if an employee or executive meets certain goals.
Overall, the cannabis industry added 107,000 new jobs in the US last year as more states opened their doors to legal cannabis, according to a report from the cannabis information site Leafly. The industry supports more than 428,000 full-time jobs as of January of this year.
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