Marketing is growing twice as fast as the U.S. average. The catch is who agencies are hiring, and what it costs later.
The standard warning about AI is that it comes for the jobs. In marketing, it came for the bottom of the job ladder instead. Overall marketing hiring has held up, but agencies are pulling back on entry-level roles, the rung where careers used to begin.
New federal data shows that marketing-related roles are expanding faster than the broader labor market, with rising wages and increasing demand for senior talent. A new report by the Kaplan Group breaks down how many people work in marketing, where those jobs are concentrated, and what the latest trends mean for agencies and their clients.
Key Takeaways
- 1.77 million people work in marketing-related jobs as of May 2025, up about 74,000 from 2023.
- Core marketing roles grew 5.7% in two years, far outpacing overall U.S. job growth of roughly 2.4% over the same period.
- 57% of agencies report slowing entry-level hiring due to AI, while demand rises for senior and technical roles.
How Many People Work in Marketing-related Jobs?
Marketing represents a large, nationwide professional job category in the United States. In the latest Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics data from May 2025, 1,766,220 workers held jobs in the core-plus-adjacent marketing grouping tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, spanning marketing managers, market research analysts, public relations professionals, advertising managers, and advertising sales agents. That is up from 1,692,350 in May 2023, a net gain of 73,870 jobs over two years.
Within the narrower core-only definition, which excludes advertising sales agents and focuses on the occupations most central to agency work, employment reached 1,674,520 in May 2025, compared to 1,584,250 in May 2023. That 5.7% increase is significantly stronger than the overall U.S. employment growth rate of approximately 2.4% recorded during the same period.
Are Marketing Jobs Growing as a Share of the Workforce?
Marketing jobs not only grew in raw numbers, they also increased their share of the broader labor force. In the core-plus-adjacent grouping, marketing roles represented 11.14 jobs per 1,000 workers in May 2023 and 11.36 jobs per 1,000 workers in May 2025. In the core-only definition, jobs per 1,000 workers rose from 10.43 to 10.77 over the same period.
This matters because the overall U.S. labor market was adding jobs at a historically slow pace in 2025. As first reported, total non-farm employment grew by only about 584,000 jobs for the full year, the weakest performance outside of recessions since 2003. BLS benchmark revisions in early 2026 cut that figure further, underscoring how soft hiring was. Against that backdrop, marketing occupations gaining workforce share signals above-average demand for these roles relative to the broader economy.
How Much Do Marketing Jobs Pay?
Marketing jobs pay well and are getting more expensive for employers. In May 2025, the weighted annual mean wage across the core-plus-adjacent marketing grouping was $111,903, up from $104,095 in May 2023, a 7.5% increase in two years. Weighted annual median wages crossed the six-figure mark in this period, rising from $93,894 to $100,647, a 7.2% gain.
The core-only grouping tells a similar story. Weighted annual mean wages rose from $106,024 in May 2023 to $113,613 in May 2025, a 7.2% increase. Weighted annual median wages climbed from $96,120 to $102,609, crossing the six-figure threshold for median pay in this occupational set.
These wage gains significantly outpace general salary growth. The national median salary increase across all marketing job postings reached 8.7% year-over-year in 2024 according to Taligence and Aspen Technology Labs, well above the 3.9% national salary growth rate recorded in the BLS Employer Cost Index for the same period.
Where Are Marketing Jobs Concentrated?
Marketing employment is not evenly distributed. Large, tech-driven, or government-heavy state economies tend to concentrate both the most marketing workers and the highest-paying roles.
Marketing employment clusters in a handful of states where these roles make up a much larger share of the workforce than average. In New York, Massachusetts, and Colorado, there are more than 14 core marketing workers for every 1,000 jobs, with New York leading the country at nearly 18 per 1,000. California combines high concentration with sheer scale, with about 12 core marketing workers per 1,000 jobs and more than 218,000 core marketing workers overall.
The map also highlights a tier of states where marketing work is both common and well paid. Washington, Virginia, and New Jersey each have around 10–12 core marketing workers per 1,000 jobs, with weighted mean wages above or near six figures, reflecting strong demand from tech, government, and professional services employers. Florida, North Carolina, and Texas sit close to the national average in concentration, but their sheer scale means the absolute totals are large: about 53,000 core marketing workers in North Carolina, 106,000 in Florida, and 145,000 in Texas.
At the other end of the spectrum, smaller and more resource-driven states have far fewer marketing workers relative to their overall workforce. Wyoming, New Mexico, Louisiana, South Dakota, Mississippi, and West Virginia all sit below 5–5.5 core marketing workers per 1,000 jobs, roughly half or less of the concentration seen in New York or Massachusetts. That gap means agencies and marketing teams in low-concentration states are drawing from a much smaller local talent pool and may need to rely more on remote hiring or out-of-state partners to access specialized skills.
What Does AI Mean for Marketing Jobs?
Generative AI is becoming a central workforce issue for marketing agencies. A survey of 225 U.S. marketing agency leaders conducted in August 2025 by Sunup found that 57% of agencies have slowed or paused entry-level hiring as AI absorbs execution work once handled by junior staff. At the same time, 75% of those agencies are actively hiring for AI-focused roles that blend creative and technical depth, and 91% of agency leaders expect headcount to be reduced by AI as value shifts toward senior-led work.
That shift helps explain the data patterns in the OEWS numbers. Active marketing job listings grew 3.7% overall in 2024, but senior-level new job postings rose 7.8%, outpacing that broader growth rate. Entry-level roles still represent a healthy share of postings, 34.5% of active listings at year-end 2024, but the direction of pressure is clearly toward more experienced and analytically capable workers.
The Hidden Cashflow Risk to Watch Next
“Treat AI-driven restructuring as a risk to track in forecasts, not just a cost savings.”
The “AI plus senior talent” mix that is saving agencies money today is quietly building a longer-term cash flow risk, and it is one most firms should model deliberately rather than treat as a guaranteed win. The savings are real, but they come from two changes that each raise future costs in ways an hourly pricing model tends to hide.
Risk to the talent pipeline
The first change is that slowing junior hiring dismantles the internal talent pipeline. The Sunup survey found that 57% of agencies have slowed or paused entry-level hiring as AI absorbs the execution work junior staff used to handle, and this is not unique to marketing: an IDC study commissioned by Deel reports that roughly two-thirds of global companies expect to slow entry-level hiring as they adopt more AI. That looks efficient, but removing the “hire, train, promote” path means future senior capacity has to be bought on the open market at a premium instead of developed in-house.
Tech debt and increasing fixed costs
The second change is that AI converts part of what used to be variable labor into a fixed, recurring technology cost that is hard to dial back in a downturn, far harder than headcount. Agencies do not control AI model pricing, so they carry the risk that vendors raise rates, or that compute costs creep higher even as clients resist fee increases. Some cost-comparison work already shows that for certain tasks, AI platforms can approach or exceed the fully loaded cost of a staff member once usage and tooling scale up. The result is an accounting blind spot: most firms still plan and price work on an hourly model, but “hours plus technology” is a different cost structure, and many are underestimating the tech spend their new workflows require.
Both changes land on the same vulnerable spot, which is timing. Research from the JPMorgan Chase Institute on more than 600,000 small businesses finds that cash flow timing, not profitability, is often what triggers short-term failure. A firm can look profitable on paper yet go insolvent in a single month if receivables are delayed while payables come due.
For agencies paying more for marketing managers, strategists, and specialists while layering in ongoing AI costs, the takeaway is not that failure is inevitable. It’s that these new fixed and hard-to-control expenses need to be modeled explicitly, cash flow watched closely, and treated as a risk to track in forecasts, not just a cost savings.
Methodology
This analysis uses U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) data for May 2023, May 2024, and May 2025, drawn from the national and state cross-industry tables (NAICS 0). OEWS measures occupational employment and wage rates for wage-and-salary workers in nonfarm establishments, and provides comparable estimates across the nation, states, and other geographic areas.
The occupational grouping was built in two layers. The core marketing category includes advertising and promotions managers, marketing managers, public relations managers, market research analysts and marketing specialists, and public relations specialists. A broader core-plus-adjacent grouping adds advertising sales agents to capture a wider set of marketing-related roles that often support agency and client-facing work.
National employment totals, average wages, and median wages for each grouping were calculated as employment-weighted aggregates of the occupation-level OEWS estimates in each year. Two-year growth rates compare May 2025 with May 2023, while annual changes compare each release with the prior year. State-level figures reflect all covered employment in each state across industries, not employment at marketing agencies alone.
To compare state concentration, the analysis uses core marketing workers per 1,000 jobs and location quotients. “Workers per 1,000 jobs” standardizes state employment counts against each state’s overall job base, while the location quotient shows whether marketing occupations make up a larger or smaller share of a state’s workforce than they do nationally; values above 1.0 indicate above-average concentration.
Wage estimates are presented as annual mean and annual median pay using the OEWS published values. Because the OEWS is an occupational survey rather than an agency census, the results describe the broader U.S. market for marketing-related occupations across the economy, including in-house, consulting, media, technology, and agency settings.
