Live numbers from the board, not received wisdom. Every figure below is computed from the 180 roles open right now — last checked 6 September 2026. Where a question has no data behind it, the answer says so.
180 roles are live on CuratorSearch as of 2026-09-07, across 9 fields — the largest is Curatorial with 31. Every one was found on an institution's own careers page and is re-checked daily at 06:00 UTC; a role is marked closed once it has been missing from two consecutive checks.
The board sorts roles into 9 fields. Right now: Curatorial (31), Collections (28), Education & Public Programmes (25), Production (25), Intern & Fellowship (23), Leadership (23), Conservation (11), Archives (8), Other (6). In plain terms: Curatorial means curators and curatorial assistants, from assistant to chief; Collections means registrars, collections managers and art handlers; Education & Public Programmes means educators, learning teams and public programme staff; Production means exhibition production, technicians and installation; Intern & Fellowship means internships, fellowships and traineeships; Leadership means directors, heads of department and senior management; Conservation means conservators and conservation technicians; Archives means archivists and records roles; Other means roles that fit none of the above.
By city, the most open roles today are in New York (8), Indianapolis (8), Chicago (7), San Francisco (6) and Cleveland (5). Coverage is densest in Europe, the UK and North America, which reflects where institutions publish vacancies on their own websites rather than where museums are.
As of 2026-09-07: Newfields / Indianapolis Museum of Art (8 open roles), Cleveland Museum of Art (5 open roles), Philadelphia Museum of Art (5 open roles), MoMA PS1 (4 open roles) and CAM - Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian (Lisboa) (4 open roles). Each institution has its own page listing everything it has advertised, and you can follow one to get an email the day it posts.
Honest answer: most postings don't say. Of the 180 museum and curatorial roles live today, 22% state a salary. Among those that do, the median advertised salary is about €60,200 a year, annualised for comparison — but that spans junior and senior roles, several countries and public and private employers, so it is a midpoint, not a rate for the job. The figures behind it are listed individually, exactly as each employer advertised them.
22% of live postings, as of 2026-09-07. That counts an explicit figure or a public-sector pay grade that maps to a published table (which is how most German postings state pay). By field, Archives roles state pay most often (38% of 8). The true share is a little higher: UK pay bands and US pay-transparency ranges aren't parsed yet.
Collective agreements for the German public sector: TV-L covers the federal states (Länder) and most state museums and universities; TVöD covers the federal government and municipalities. A posting that says 'Entgeltgruppe 13 TV-L' or 'EG 11 TVöD' is stating its pay — each grade maps to a published monthly table with steps for experience. CuratorSearch decodes these into euro ranges so they appear alongside explicitly stated salaries. Private institutions sometimes pay 'in Anlehnung an' (analogous to) a scale without being bound to it; those are marked.
Not usually, and the adverts bear that out: of the 25 open curatorial postings with a full description, 4% mention a doctorate at all and 16% mention a master's. A PhD matters most for research-led curatorial posts at large collections and in parts of continental Europe; for most assistant and associate roles a relevant master's plus exhibitions you have actually worked on counts for more. Read the posting: 'required' and 'desirable' are different words.
There is no licence and no single route. The common path is a degree in art history, archaeology, museum studies or the relevant subject, then an entry point — an internship, fellowship, curatorial assistant or collections role — and a record of exhibitions, research or public programmes you can point to. In practice the ladder is assistant curator, associate curator, curator, then senior or chief curator or head of department, and moving between institutions is how most people move up. Watching the sector's own careers pages rather than general job boards is the single biggest practical advantage, because that is where most of these roles are only ever advertised.
A curator is responsible for the intellectual content: research, interpretation, acquisitions and exhibitions. A registrar manages the paperwork and logistics of objects — loans, insurance, shipping, documentation. A collections manager looks after the physical care, storage and movement of the collection day to day. A conservator is a trained specialist who examines, stabilises and treats objects, usually with a conservation degree behind them. Smaller institutions fold several of these into one post; larger ones split them further.
Rarely fully remote: 4% of the 126 live postings with a full description mention remote or hybrid working at all. Object-based work — curatorial, collections, conservation, production — is on site by nature. Where hybrid arrangements appear it is usually for research, digital, education and administrative roles.
Among live roles that state a deadline, the median window from a role appearing on the board to its closing date is 26 days. Public-sector and university posts tend to run longer; galleries and small institutions often close within a fortnight or simply 'until filled'. Each listing shows its deadline where the source stated one, and the closing-soon filter surfaces the ones about to go.
Some do, and the adverts are getting clearer about it: 13% of the 23 internship or fellowship postings open today state pay. Fellowships at large institutions are usually salaried or stipended; unpaid internships still exist but are increasingly the exception, and the ones that pay tend to say so prominently. Any that stated a figure are listed on the salaries page.
From more than 400 sources, overwhelmingly institutions' own careers pages — the museums, galleries and cultural organisations publishing their own vacancies. Never from Indeed or LinkedIn. Every listing links to the original posting on the employer's site, which is where you apply; CuratorSearch is an index, not the source of record.
Every source is re-checked once a day at 06:00 UTC. To hear about new roles without checking: the free Friday digest sends five picks for your field each week; following an institution sends one email the day it posts; and there is an RSS feed you can filter by field or region for a feed reader, Slack or a Discord bot.
Yes — free, for any purpose, under CC BY 4.0, with attribution. Cite it as 'CuratorSearch Curatorial Pay Archive, curatorsearch.com/salaries' with the date. The whole archive is downloadable as CSV or JSON, and every figure is as advertised: never converted between currencies, never estimated.
A question this doesn't answer? Ask — the useful ones get added here, with data.
