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The purpose of gathering this data is to strengthen the performing arts industry by making it more transparent and competitive with other industries. “It’s essential that the performing arts field retain the invaluable talent we already have in our organizations and attract new talent to the performing arts workforce.” APAP President and CEO Lisa Richards Toney urges, “APAP’s role is to strengthen the field, and key to strengthening it is that the performing arts must be competitive on par with other industries. This new report is central to that charge.”
“Recruiting and retaining quality talent is critical to our health and to the strength of the work that we do bringing artists and audiences together. Compensation is obviously a very important part of that,” affirms one Arts Compensation Project pilot participant, a CEO at a major performing arts presenting organization. “I found [the data] enormously helpful when posting positions and during our annual personnel reviews.”
In practice, the timely and detailed information provided by the Arts Compensation Project empowers arts leaders to advocate for competitive salaries. “I was already able to use the data to secure a pay raise for one of our key positions. It was an ongoing challenge for several years, and the APAP data made the difference," explains another pilot participant, an executive director at a university-based performing arts center. “If you are a university presenter, … it's been my experience that our HR had a difficult time finding what they felt were matching roles,… so having this [data] that was so specific to our industry was extremely helpful.”
The 2024 Arts Compensation Project Data and Trend Report looks at compensation and demographic data from FY23, submitted by 65 performing arts presenting organizations for over 1,000 arts workers, as well as including some longitudinal data from FY21 and FY22. Participating organizations came from 28 states across all regions of the U.S., with budgets ranging from under $500K to $13M. Just under 60% were independent not-for-profit presenters, with university/college presenters, municipal presenting organizations, and festivals making up the balance.
The report is 60 pages long. Compensation data, which makes up most of the report, includes base salary, bonus and incentives, deferred compensation, other reportable compensation, and other non-taxed benefits. The report includes 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles for total compensation for seven management levels, in the following departments: Administration, Box Office, Development, Education, Events, Finance, Marketing, Operations, Production, and Programming. The report has more than 90 graphs and tables illustrating the data.
Additionally, the report provides demographics of the reporting cohort, principal administrators, new hires, and breakdowns of departments by age, gender, race, and education level. It also provides data on the ratio of permanent to temporary workers and insights on the leadership structures and hierarchy of positions within differently sized organizations.
Here are some key findings from the report:
The workforce has limited diversity in several areas. The workforce reported by our sample was relatively young, majority female, highly educated, and predominantly White. Among employees for whom data was reported for each demographic, 67% were under 50, 60% were women, 79% held a bachelor’s degree or higher, and 84% were White.
Reliance on temporary staff is high and may be growing. Across different budget sizes, participating organizations reported that temporary workers (non-permanent part-time or seasonal positions) represented roughly two-thirds of total staffing in FY23. Early longitudinal data shows rapid growth in total staff sizes over the past three years, capturing a rebound effect as the industry has come out of the pandemic. Between FY21 and FY23, the average number of employees per organization increased by 43%, driven by a 66% increase in temporary positions. During the same period, the number of full-time positions rose 22% and part-time permanent positions remained flat, suggesting both that organizations are re-staffing and that the field’s reliance on temporary workers may be increasing.
Department-level compensation trends vary widely. Within our sample, median compensation for full-time employees in FY23 was between $60K and $70K in most departments, while the median for Principal Administrators (Executive Directors, etc.) was $143K. Finance was the department with the highest median compensation, at $85K. At participating organizations where longitudinal data was present, the overall median compensation increased 7.5% from FY21 to FY23. This varied significantly between departments, however, ranging from a 33% increase in Education to a 7% decrease in Communications.
Since FY21 the lowest-paid workers have seen higher proportional gains. Looking at compensation in terms of Management Level—seniority of role—our longitudinal data also shows that an increase in median compensation between FY21 and FY23 varied by Level, with less senior levels seeing larger percentage increases. Median compensation in Level 4 (e.g., Associates) rose by 20%, while median compensation for Principal Administrators (Executive Directors, etc.) rose only 6.5%.
The Arts Compensation Project Data & Trend Report is available to APAP members at https://apap365.org/programs/arts-compensation-project/. To learn more about APAP membership, visit https://apap365.org/membership/
The APAP Arts Compensation Project is funded in part by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Wallace Foundation.
To learn more about the Arts Compensation Project, visit https://apap365.org/programs/arts-compensation-project/.
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