Where the money comes from
What the hours are worth. The hours handed back in a week,
priced at the $100 to $180 an hour below. It is time returned, not cash
returned: what it is actually worth depends on what gets done with it, and if those hours
go back into meetings it is worth nothing. The claim is only that the time is real and
that it currently has a price.
Everyone else's hours. Ninety minutes a person a week: the
status call they sat in to say what they had already typed, the chasing, and working out
which rows were theirs. Mine too, not a published series, and deliberately low.
For scale, the program itself. US Bureau of Labor Statistics,
December 2025: civilian total compensation is $48.78 an hour, of which $15.33 is benefits.
A sixteen-person program is about $135,000 a month in people alone, before a license or a
consultant. Every figure on this page is small against that one.
The program manager. $100 to $180 an hour is the going contract
rate for an experienced program manager, from twenty-two years of hiring and being hired at
it. That one is mine, not a published series, and no federal source measures it. Monthly
figures are that rate across a 173-hour month. For the employed equivalent, BLS
Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 puts the mean wage for project
management specialists at $110,740, which loads to roughly $13,200 a month on the BLS
benefits share. Both are on the page because they answer different questions: what a
contractor charges, and what a hire costs.
For scale, from the field, not from me. 36% of organizations mostly
or always finish projects on time (Wellingtone, 2026). 9.9% of every dollar is wasted on
poor project performance, about $161,000 a year on
a program this size (PMI, 2018). Large IT projects run 45% over budget for 56% less value
(McKinsey and Oxford, 2012). None of these are HeyPM client results and none are a promise
about yours.
BLS compensation ·
BLS wages ·
Wellingtone ·
PMI ·
McKinsey and Oxford