Best States for Training and Development Managers: California, New York, and Texas Stand Out for Scale and Pay

Across the top 10 states, LaborCove’s data shows clear variation in how salary, employment levels, and Geography Scores align for training and development managers. Some states combine large employment counts with strong but not top‑end pay, while others pair relatively small employment levels with very high reported median salaries. The occupation’s national projected employment growth of 5.8% provides useful context for these geographic comparisons, but it remains a national projection rather than a state‑by‑state forecast. The state rankings here are based on current salary, employment, and Geography Score evidence, not on projected future hiring in individual states.

Nationally, training and development managers have a reported median annual salary of $133000 and employment of 48050. These figures define the broad national context in which the top‑ranked states operate. The occupation’s national projected employment growth rate is 5.8%. This projection describes expected change for training and development managers across the entire U.S. and is not a forecast for any individual state in the ranking. Within this national picture, the largest single state employment count in the supplied data is 6680, which belongs to California. That means California alone accounts for a noticeable share of the reported national total, although the exact share is not calculated here.

LaborCove ranks California first among the supplied states for training and development managers, with a Geography Score of 80.8. New York follows in second place with a Geography Score of 71.62, and Texas ranks third with a Geography Score of 62.32. New Jersey (57.0) and Washington (54.12) complete the top five by Geography Score. All five lead the remaining states in this dataset on this composite measure, but their salary and employment profiles differ in important ways that the following sections explore. At the lower end of the top‑10 list by Geography Score, Virginia ranks 10th with a Geography Score of 43.44, trailing Colorado at 44.9 and Florida at 44.26. This illustrates that even within the top 10, LaborCove’s scores cover a meaningful range rather than clustering tightly around a single value.

The state with the highest reported median salary in this top‑10 set is Delaware at $172340, yet Delaware ranks sixth by Geography Score. New York also reports a high median salary of $171400 and places second overall, while Washington’s median salary of $163360 supports its fourth‑place ranking. California, despite ranking first by Geography Score, has a median salary of $156260, which is lower than the median salaries reported for Delaware, New York, and Washington. Texas, ranked third overall, has a reported median salary of $124280, which is below the national median of $133000. These comparisons show that the LaborCove Geography Score does not simply mirror salary levels. For example, Delaware’s median salary exceeds California’s, but Delaware ranks below California on the composite Geography Score. Similarly, Texas ranks ahead of Florida by Geography Score even though Texas has a higher median salary of $124280 compared with Florida’s $118290.

California has the largest reported state employment count in this dataset for training and development managers at 6680. Texas follows with 6190, giving these two states the highest employment counts among the top‑ranked locations. Florida has the next‑largest count among the listed states at 3550, slightly above New York’s 3500. Several top‑10 states combine smaller reported employment counts with high Geography Scores. Washington reports 720 employed training and development managers and ranks fourth, while Colorado reports 850 and ranks eighth. Delaware has both the smallest reported employment count at 70 and the highest median salary among these top‑ranked states. Vermont appears in the top 10 with a Geography Score of 47.47 and a median salary of $124990, but its employment count is not supplied. Because this value is missing, no employment‑level comparison can be made between Vermont and the other states in this dataset.

Within the top three states by Geography Score, California and Texas stand out for combining high rankings with the two largest reported employment counts among the listed states. New York’s second‑place rank reflects a different profile: its employment count of 3500 is smaller than those of California and Texas, but it reports a higher median salary than either state. Further down the list, New Jersey and Washington both pair strong median salaries—$160540 and $163360, respectively—with mid‑range employment counts in this group of 1540 and 720. Colorado and Virginia occupy the lower end of the top‑10 ranking while still reporting median salaries of $139980 and $137520, both of which are above the national median of $133000. These patterns highlight that the “best” state depends on how individuals weight salary, employment levels, and Geography Score. LaborCove’s rankings summarize how these factors combine numerically for each state, but the relative importance of each metric varies by person.

LaborCove bases this analysis on authoritative U.S. labor‑market data and its own Geography Score methodology for comparing locations. For training and development managers (occupation code 11-3131), national employment and median salaries come from Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) observations referring to May 2025, with a 2026 report year. National projected employment growth is drawn from a separate long‑term occupational projection series and applies to the occupation nationally, not to specific states. The Geography Score summarizes multiple labor‑market factors into a single comparable value for each state. In this article, only the resulting Geography Score, median annual salary, ranking position, and employment counts are used. The internal weighting of those components is not interpreted beyond the published score itself. Rankings should be considered alongside individual priorities such as preferred industries, commuting range, and personal circumstances, which are not captured in this dataset. LaborCove’s role is to quantify differences that are visible in the numbers, not to recommend one “best” state for every training and development manager.