Download the 2025 Salary Survey here!

This is AAMD's first Salary Survey in two years, as we took 2024 to make needed some needed revisions to the survey. (The 2023 Salary Survey is available here).

Updates and improvements you’ll see in the 2025 Salary Survey include:

• 19 new art museum jobs, all added based on feedback from AAMD member museum directors and staff
• Refreshed job titles and alternate titles for some roles
• Refreshed job descriptions for some roles
• Adjustments to the Operating Budget categories used to benchmark salaries to better reflect the makeup of AAMD’s membership
• Addition of Regional Price Parities, to factor in cost of living across regions
• Addition of benchmarks by city and state, where there is sufficient data

For the first time AAMD partnered with Rex & Partners to produce the final survey report. The team at Rex and Partners aggregated the raw data, provided analysis and development of insights, implemented the benchmarking updates, and introduced the Regional Price Parities, among other improvements. 

Due to changes in job titles, some anomalies may appear in the data. In 2023, certain salaries may have been reported under the closest available title rather than the actual role. In 2025, with the expanded set of titles, those same roles are now captured more accurately. For instance, a senior exhibitions manager’s salary may have previously been included under Exhibition Project Manager (formerly Curator of Exhibitions / Curator C) but is now reported under the new Director of Exhibitions title. While this creates more consistency going forward, direct comparisons with 2023 data may still show some discrepancies.