Museum Pay Transparency Index 2026
Which museums and galleries say what they pay. Every institution with at least 3 postings on record, ranked by the share of its own advertisements that stated a salary. Counts of postings, not estimates — and every posting behind a number is linked from the institution's page.
Read every rate here as a floor, not a measurement. A rate is the share of postings in which this site could read a salary. Where a museum's advertisements are published on a platform we do not yet parse correctly, its rate is too low — in some cases zero against an institution that in fact states pay on every advert. Known-affected at the moment: UK postings generally, and postings reaching us via ADP WorkforceNow. Postings on UltiPro — The Museum of Modern Art, Cleveland Museum of Art and Newfields — were not read at all until 5 October 2026; they are read now, but 19 of their earlier adverts were withdrawn before we could return to them, so those three rates remain too low. Until the same date MoMA's postings were listed here under MoMA PS1, which was our error: none of them was PS1's. A reader found this and was right; the extraction is being rebuilt, and these figures will move. Until then, please do not cite a low rate as evidence about any named institution.
1059 postings on record47% stated pay68 institutions rankedUpdated 2 November 2026
Stated pay on every posting
28 institutions disclosed a salary on all of their postings on record.
- Royal Ontario Museum12/12
- Sainsbury Centre8/8
- Art Gallery of Ontario7/7
- Institute of Contemporary Art Boston6/6
- Walker Art Center6/6
- ArtLink5/5
- Boxart5/5
- MASS MoCA5/5
- Robert Rauschenberg Foundation4/4
- Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, Potsdam4/4
- The Broad (Los Angeles)4/4
- Aiston Fine Art Services3/3
- Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA - Adelaide)3/3
- Dia Art Foundation3/3
- Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane3/3
- Museum Bautzen, Bautzen3/3
- Museumsstiftung Post und Telekommunikation3/3
- Nederlands Openluchtmuseum3/3
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum3/3
- Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe3/3
- Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden3/3
- Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart, Stuttgart3/3
- Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Berlin3/3
- The Barbican3/3
- The Frick Collection3/3
- The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York)3/3
- Tiroler Landesmuseen-Betriebsgesellschaft m.b.H., Hall i. Tirol (Österreich)3/3
- Yale Center for British Art3/3
The ranking
Median is the annualised midpoint of that institution's stated ranges, in euros at coarse rates — for comparison only; the stated figure on each posting is the authoritative one.
By country
| Country | Stated | Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Canada | 20/23 | 87% |
| United States | 199/258 | 77% |
| Austria | 7/11 | 64% |
| Germany | 114/190 | 60% |
| Ireland | 3/5 | 60% |
| United Kingdom | 33/66 | 50% |
| France | 4/12 | 33% |
| Switzerland | 4/71 | 6% |
| Belgium | 0/62 | 0% |
| Denmark | 0/22 | 0% |
| United Arab Emirates | 0/7 | 0% |
| Croatia | 0/6 | 0% |
| Spain | 0/6 | 0% |
| Italy | 0/5 | 0% |
Countries with at least 5 postings on record. Two reasons not to read this as a league table of national virtue. German public-sector grades (TV-L/TVöD) map to published tables, so they count as stated pay and Germany is flattered. And the UK figure is understated by a gap on our side, not theirs: 58% of UK postings on record reach us without their full text, against 4% of German ones, so where a UK advert does state a salary we often cannot see it.
Method
A posting states pay if it gives an explicit amount or names a public-sector pay grade that maps to a published salary table. Each posting counts once, open or closed; the archive keeps every advertised salary after the listing ends, so the index grows rather than churns. Aggregator rows without an identified employer are counted in the sector figure but not ranked. A posting whose text we could not read at all is left out of every count: silence we cannot see is not silence.
Where a country's postings reach us as little more than a title and a link, its rate measures our coverage as much as its employers' candour. That is currently the case for the UK and, to a lesser extent, Ireland and Belgium. It is a limitation of this index, stated here rather than buried, and the fix is ours to make.
Every row here is downloadable, so the ranking can be checked rather than taken on trust: CSV or JSON, the JSON carrying its own method note and citation line.
The Index is recomputed on each request from the same records as /salaries and the Hiring Index. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0 as “CuratorSearch Museum Pay Transparency Index, curatorsearch.com/pay-transparency-index” with the date, or via the archive DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22544232. Method note: Samman, N. (2026). How often do museum job postings state pay? A data note from one month of live listings, August–September 2026 (Version 1.1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23541149
Institutions: your postings are the source. State the pay and the number moves — post a role with a salary and it is badged Salary Transparent.
291 live roles from these institutions right now.
Members saw today's roles today — not in Friday's sample. Every field, every region, the day it's posted.
See the whole board — free for 2 weeksThen €5 / month.
Cite this page
Samman, N. (2026). Museum Pay Transparency Index. CuratorSearch. https://curatorsearch.com/pay-transparency-index (accessed 2 November 2026). DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22544232.