Findings: Pay and Promotions

Despite many calls for living wages and pay equity in the art museum sector, the question remains of what constitutes fair pay and, importantly, how this fits within the financial realities of any given museum. As it stands in 2025, museums spend an average of 56% of their annual operating budgets on staff compensation and benefits.⁴² Additionally, nearly three-quarters (73%) of museum directors say “financial stability of the institution” is one of their top three priorities (see fig. 35). This tension between adequate worker compensation and the financial stability of the institution is ever more acute in 2025, when once-stable funding streams from government entities are diminishing if not disappearing entirely, as competition for private funding skyrockets.⁴³

This section, utilizing detailed pay and household demographic data, aims to support a deeper understanding of what fair pay entails within this complex context. We use a living wage calculation reflective of local cost of living for each worker to establish a baseline for what full-time art museum workers should earn to cover their basic living expenses given their location. This calculation sets a floor, or the minimum amount of workers’ wages needed to meet their personal expenses, excluding dependent costs, savings, and any nonessential expenses. 

Even using this conservative calculation, the data shows that 28% of full-time art museum workers make below a living wage for their region, and that full-time entry-level and associate-level workers are barely scraping by on their museum incomes to meet their basic needs. Although it may be unsurprising that the ability to cover basic living expenses improves with position level, this difference is particularly acute in a sector where advancing up the hierarchy is so challenging, and where 78% of workers have never received a full promotion at their museum. In short, this data confirms what art museum workers have said time and again: many simply cannot afford to stay in the field long enough to earn a living wage.⁴⁴

Given the high costs of employee turnover,⁴⁵ museum leadership should consider how living wages for their full team would support their top priority of long-term financial stability.

The 2025 median annual compensation for art museum workers is $45,800.⁴⁷ This median includes all workers, full-time and part-time, which constitutes 84% and 17% of the art museum workforce, respectively. 

The median income for full-time art museum workers is $65,000 per year, which is slightly higher than the US average of $62,000 per year.⁴⁸ The median yearly income for part-time workers (from their museum income alone) is $19,000. These numbers reflect the median earner, or the worker “in the middle,” of all art museum salaries.⁴⁹

For the rest of this section, we will focus specifically on the experiences of full-time workers as a baseline to understand if they make a living wage from their museum income alone. Although it is to be expected that part-time workers rely on additional sources of income to meet their basic living expenses, we want to acknowledge that more research is needed to better understand how part-time workers are faring in art museums. Given that 40% of part-time workers say they would prefer full-time work within their museums, we plan to focus further on their experiences in future MMF programs and data studies.

The median salary for full-time Black workers is $7,000 less per year than their white counterparts and $9,000 less per year than their Asian counterparts. Even accounting for position level, we see that a larger proportion of Black workers are manager-level and above (compared to white and Asian workers) and still have lower-than-average salaries, which means there is a racial pay gap wherein Black workers are paid less than their peers even at the same position level.

The size and type of museum have a significant impact on workers’ median salaries. While we have explored the many ways in which small museums outperform larger museums in this report, particularly in terms of workplace culture and career satisfaction, this does not hold true for pay. The median annual salary for full-time workers at small museums is nearly $10,000 less than at large museums. 

Contemporary and/or modern art museums have the lowest full-time median compensation ($61,500 annually) compared to all other museum types. City or county museums have the highest full-time median compensation ($73,000 annually). It is relevant to note that city or county museums also have the largest proportion of union members (27% compared to a 14% average in art museums overall). We explore the impact of unions on worker pay later in this section.

Household income plays a significant role in workers’ overall finances. It includes any additional income or funds from another job, a partner’s pay, investments, or other sources. The median household income for full-time art museum workers is $98,000. White full-time workers have higher household incomes than those of all other racial groups, which aligns with broader US trends.⁵⁰The largest gaps by race or ethnicity in household income are between white workers ($100,000 annually) and Black workers ($76,000 annually).

It is critical to note that in the art museum sector, more than a quarter (28%) of full-time workers rely on other sources of household income to cover their living expenses. If art museums continue to rely on workers subsidizing low pay with other income, this will continue to impact the demographics of who can afford to work in the field, considering nationwide trends regarding racial wealth gaps.⁵¹ Simply put, white workers may be able to sustain longer periods of lower pay earlier in their museum careers than BIPOC workers.

To better understand the financial picture of full-time art museum workers, we analyzed a minimum living wage,⁵² which the Economic Policy Institute defines as the income needed for families to afford basic necessities such as housing, food, health care, childcare, and transportation.⁵³ This does not include other costs that many workers may feel are necessary, such as contributions to savings or retirement accounts, debt payments, support for nondependents, leisure activities, or unexpected costs. A minimum living wage is just that: the minimum salary required to be able to afford the basics given the cost of living for a specific location. 

To estimate a full-time worker’s living wage, we used median income (individual and household), household size, number of dependents, and the museum’s metropolitan area to get a sense of the cost of living in that geographic area. Below is a point of reference for how the living wage is calculated for different household sizes for workers at MMF Partner Museums⁵⁴ in the metropolitan areas with the lowest and highest costs of living.

Individual Income

First, we consider a very conservative measure of living wage: a full-time individual museum worker’s ability to cover just their own living expenses (not including dependents) with their museum income. What we find is that the median art museum worker makes 124% of their region’s living wage from their museum income alone in this narrow context. This means that the median full-time art museum worker, encompassing workers from the entry through executive levels, makes 24% above a living wage—before accounting for savings contributions, debt payments, or any dependents or nonworking adults they might need to support. However, there is a sizable portion (28%) of full-time museum workers who still make below a living wage even using this very narrow framing for what living wages would need to cover.

The above metric helps us understand the overall percentage of workers who are making above or below a living wage, but just how much are art museum workers making? The median full-time entry-level worker makes 87% of the living wage, whereas the median executive-level staff makes 238% of the living wage. This increase with position level is unsurprising, as income typically increases alongside career advancement, whereas the living wage remains the same. However, it is critical to consider both how common it is for workers not to be able to afford basic expenses at the lower position levels of the institution (69% of full-time entry-level workers make below a living wage) and what this data means for a museum worker’s ability to stay in the field long enough to earn a living wage.

Household Income

We also calculated the percentage of full-time art museum workers whose households make below a living wage, which includes income from multiple adults (if applicable) and the costs to support dependents (again, if applicable). To calculate a living wage based on household income, we took into account a worker’s household size, the number of adults working in the household, and the number of children (up to two), as well as their location (metropolitan statistical area). 

When accounting for these additional factors, the median full-time art museum worker’s household income is slightly lower than for the individual (118% of the living wage for households vs. 124% for individuals). This difference may be partially attributable to the fact that this calculation includes dependent costs, suggesting that it is more difficult to afford to work in an art museum as a parent or guardian, even with additional household income.

In alignment with the racial pay gap noted earlier, white workers’ households make the largest percentage above a living wage of any racial or ethnic group in the art museum sector. 

Benefits coverage continues to be one area where art museum workers are predominantly satisfied, illustrating a bright spot for the sector. Satisfaction with employee benefits (healthcare, retirement, etc.) is 62% (up from 58% in 2023), which is significantly better than among US workers overall (49%). Workers at college or university art museums are even more satisfied (81%) with their benefits than peers at other museums.

This satisfaction aligns with the fact that, when compared with US workers in private industries, US art museum workers have more access to many types of benefits.⁵⁶ This is particularly notable for part-time art museum workers as compared to US workers in private industries overall.

As we explored in Career Satisfaction, art museum workers are even less satisfied with their opportunities for promotion in 2025 than they were in 2023. Notably, this is the only dimension of workplace culture where art museum workers report lower satisfaction than US workers overall (24% vs 33%). In this section, we explore one of the likely reasons behind this decline in satisfaction: promotion rates in art museums have also declined since 2023.

We asked workers if they had experienced any one of three types of growth at their current museum: a pay increase and title change (full promotion), a pay increase beyond the cost of living (pay-focused promotion), or an elevation in title (hollow promotion). We do not consider the latter two types to be true promotions, but rather tools for an institution’s leadership to manage the growth and retention of staff. Still, more than half (52%) of art museum workers have never received any type of promotion at their current workplace. For reference, a recent study by Nectar HR found that 63% of US workers surveyed had received some type of promotion (including the three listed above) in the last two years alone.⁵⁷

Looking specifically at full promotions, we see that more than three-quarters (78%) of workers have never received a full promotion at their current institution. White workers are most likely to have received a full promotion (24%), followed by Hispanic or Latine/x (21%), Asian (18%), and Black workers (17%).

For workers who have received a full promotion at their museum, it took an average of 5.6 years to receive their most recent full promotion. As a point of reference, a study conducted by reviewing LinkedIn profiles of workers at large US and UK companies found that the average time to promotion was 2.5 years.⁵⁸

While it may not be surprising that large companies in other sectors offer more opportunities for promotion than art museums, it is notable that nearly half (45%) of art museum workers considering leaving the field say it is due to lack of opportunities for growth and more than a quarter (26%) say it is due to exciting opportunities in other fields. If leaders are looking for reasons why they struggle with retention, a lack of promotion opportunities is most certainly a contributing factor.

The above chart shows us that more than three-quarters (76%) of workers who have received a full promotion were promoted within six years. However, this is only part of the picture. Since 78% of art museum workers have never received a full promotion, we analyzed full promotion rates alongside those who have never received a promotion of this type. The below chart shows how long a promoted worker remained in their previous role before receiving a promotion to their current role, as well as the percentage of workers who remained without a promotion. This data, taken in conjunction with the living wage data explored above, demonstrates that the vast majority of art museum workers may be unable to afford to wait for a promotion before leaving their museums or the field altogether.

Pay is one area in which union members are faring better than the average art museum worker, aligning with a commonly held goal for organizing a union. In the US overall, nonunion workers’ weekly earnings were 85% that of union members.⁵⁹ This corresponds with other research, which also finds that unions have a broader impact on pay within a sector or region. For instance, according to the Economic Policy Institute, higher union density (more unionized workers in a sector or region) also contributes to higher overall salaries, noting in its August 2025 report: “In high-union-density states, 2023 median household income was on average more than $12,000 higher than in low-union-density states.”⁶⁰

It remains to be seen what the larger impact of more unions in the art museum sector will be, especially as it relates to salaries, but given this research, it is an important trend we will continue to watch in future studies.

To better understand the impact of unions on workers’ pay, we ran a salary comparison between unionized and nonunionized art museum workers. When controlling for gender, age, and position level, nonunion workers’ museum wages were 78% that of union members.

Relatedly, union members report an overwhelmingly positive impact of the union on their compensation (79% positive), and a majority (57%) believe that their union has had a positive impact on pay equity across the institution. 

However, a smaller proportion of Black and Hispanic or Latine/x workers (60% and 73%, respectively) note the positive impact of their union on wages and pay equity compared to their Asian (78%) and white (74%) counterparts. This gap raises questions about whether the benefits of union membership are evenly distributed, especially given that Black and Hispanic or Latine/x workers, on average, already tend to make less money than their Asian and white colleagues.

When it comes to career advancement, it is too early to determine what the impact of the new wave of unionization will be. What we can see is that union members receive a smaller proportion of promotions than art museum workers overall (12% vs. 22% overall), although this may be due in large part to the fact that many union members are entry-level workers. The research from MMF’s Study Group on Museum Union Contracts and Equity found that 100% of art museum union contracts included a provision to post jobs internally, 28% guaranteed interviews to internal candidates, and 61% included clearly benchmarked promotion procedures.⁶¹ The impact of these new provisions remains to be seen, although it is an important data point to watch as unions become more embedded in the art museum sector over time.