Arts Organizations Grow Staff Despite Challenging Conditions
3-minute read
April 30, 2024, updated July 25, 2024
Attracting, retaining, and cultivating a strong workforce is a key priority for every arts and cultural organization. But how did the arts and cultural workforce fare through the ups and downs of the labor market over the last few years? And how are organizations approaching their investments in the people – especially the artists – who are essential to fulfilling their missions?
To answer these questions, we analyzed data from FY 2019 through 2023 collected from 734 organizations through the Cultural Data Profile.
Key Findings
- Personnel expenses were consistently the largest portion of organizational expenses and played an even larger role post-pandemic – making up 56% of total expenses in 2023.
- Organizations largely retained their full-time staff through pandemic shutdowns.
- Average permanent staff size has grown over the last two years (2022 to 2023) through the addition of permanent part-time positions.
- Temporary staff size decreased more drastically during pandemic shutdowns, and has not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels.
- Personnel expenses have increased over the period analyzed, outpacing inflation by 1%.
- Organizations are rebuilding their compensation to artists after steep cuts during pandemic shutdowns, but average compensation to artists has decreased by 25% in inflation adjusted dollars over the period analyzed.
- This dynamic is especially pronounced for large organizations, while in contrast small and medium organizations’ artist compensation have outpaced or nearly kept pace with inflation, respectively.
- The number of artists hired also increased in 2022 and 2023, though it remains 2% below pre-pandemic levels.
Personnel Expenses were Consistently the Largest Driver of Organizations Expenses
Even as expense levels fluctuated throughout the pandemic, personnel expenses represented the largest expenditure throughout that period. In fact, personnel expenses made up an increasingly larger portion of the whole, especially during the most severe contraction of expenses in 2021. As organizations returned to pre-pandemic spending levels, personnel expenses made up a 4% larger portion of overall expenditures in 2023 than in 2019.
Organizations Maintained Permanent Full-Time Employees Through the Pandemic
Organizations largely retained permanent, full-time staffing levels while slowly adding part-time permanent staff over the past two years. The arts and cultural sector as a whole benefited from 40.1 billion dollars in forgivable loans via the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), and the resulting impact on workforce retention is clear.
The overall stability in permanent employment at arts and culture organizations stands in contrast with drastic increases in unemployment rates within the broader arts, culture, and recreation sector at the beginning of the pandemic. Unemployment within the broader arts sector skyrocketed to twice the national average in early 2020, and remained two to three times higher than the national rate into 2021. Since then, arts unemployment has hovered near the national rate, with some swings month to month which may be due to noise within the dataset as opposed to larger trends. The increased unemployment rates within the larger arts sector at the beginning of the pandemic may reflect the realities of contracted employees and seasonal staff as opposed to permanent staff members, as well as difference between the nonprofit sector represented in this analysis and the broader arts and culture sector represented in the unemployment data.
In contrast with permanent staff, cuts to seasonal and other temporary staff in the early pandemic are evident in the data. While organizations have built staffing in these categories back up over the last past two years, the average organization still had 12% fewer temporary staff members in 2023 than in 2019. The combination of a 4% rise in permanent staff levels and 12% drop in temporary staff adds up to overall 5% reduction in the number of people on payroll. To counterbalance some of the loss in people on payroll, the average organization hired 6% more independent contractors.
These trends were fairly stable for small and medium organizations, while in contrast large organizations saw a 3% reduction in permanent staff and a 21% reduction in temporary staff over the five-year period.
Re-Investing in People
Corresponding to the 4% rise in permanent staff levels, personnel expenses were 21% higher before taking inflation into account, and outpaced inflation by 1%. In each of the last two years, growth in compensation has exceeded inflation for all categories of organizations. This was especially true for BIPOC organizations, whose investments in personnel rose 40% above inflation while their total number of people on payroll went from 18 in 2019 to 25 in 2023. All of this reflects a significant investment in people over the last few years, which likely includes efforts to retain employees during a strong job market, as well as a modest expansion in staff sizes.
These trends are confirmed by data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) which show increases in aggregate payrolls in the performing arts and museum sectors over the last two years. While our analysis here does not analyze specific sectors, the BLS data points to variations between performing arts organizations, which show a slower and more uneven increase, and the museum sector, which displays more consistent growth over the same period.
Rebuilding Artist Compensation
In 2020 and 2021, compensation to artists declined alongside overall personnel expenses and made up a smaller portion of total personnel expenses than they did pre-pandemic. This trend began to reverse in 2022, but artist compensation still lags 25% behind inflation over the five year period and makes up a smaller percentage of total personnel expenses than before the pandemic. This is in contrast to trends we reported among a smaller cohort earlier this year.
This pattern is especially pronounced for large organizations, for whom artists compensation dropped 32% in inflation adjusted dollars from 2019 to 2023. In contrast, artist compensation for small organizations outpaced inflation by 9% and for medium organizations is was just 1% shy of keeping up with inflation. The number of artists hired also increased in 2022 and 2023, though it remains 2% below pre-pandemic levels.
Change in Artist Compensation by Budget Size Adjusted for Inflation
| Organization Size | 2019 | 2023 | % Change | Inf. Adj. % Change |
| Small Organizations | $47,031 | $60,758 | 29% | 9% |
| Medium Organizations | $141,912 | $167,500 | 18% | -1% |
| Large Organizations | $994,718 | $800,612 | -20% | -32% |