Time Machine

Public relations managers

Name: Public Relations Managers: employment and wages since 1927
Creator: Future History
License: https://futurehistory.earth/terms

Also called PR manager, Communications manager, Director of communications, Director of public relations, VP of communications

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 74,850 US public relations managers, with median pay of $146,910 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the highest was 76,060, in May 2024, close to the May 2025 count. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 500 from 1927, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for public relations managers: Media monitoring platforms, 2015 to 2023.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 5.7% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

57.5% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend.

Last updated 11 October 2026.

Cite this page

APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Public relations managers: jobs and pay since 1927 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-2032

Chicago

Future History. "Public relations managers: jobs and pay since 1927." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-2032.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_11_2032, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Public relations managers: jobs and pay since 1927}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-2032}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time

19001925195019752000now

2026

Known then as Press Agent / Publicity Agent (nascent profession era)

Known then as Publicity Director / Director of Public Relations (corporate adoption era)

Known then as Public Relations Director / VP of Public Relations (post-PRSA professionalization era)

Known then as Director of Communications / VP of Communications (corporate communications integration era)

Known then as Public Relations Managers (BLS SOC 11-2032, including Fundraising Managers)

Known today as Public Relations Managers (BLS SOC 11-2032, including Fundraising Managers)

Projected to still be called Public Relations Managers (BLS SOC 11-2032, including Fundraising Managers)

Data from the May 2025 survey

US Employment

75K

Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic

Report an error

Median Annual Wage

$146,910

Est.

≈ $143,144 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic

Report an error

Beat · 1906

Ivy Lee issued the Declaration of Principles following the Pennsylvania Railroad Atlantic City disaster, establishing the press release format and the foundational ethical principle that PR practitioners have a public responsibility beyond client obligations. Lee is widely credited as the originator of modern crisis communications.

Beat · 1923

Edward Bernays taught the first college course in public relations at New York University and published "Crystallizing Public Opinion," the first textbook in the field. Applying his uncle Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic vocabulary to mass persuasion, Bernays established the theoretical foundation for what would later be called "strategic communications."

Beat · 1927

Arthur Page joined AT&T as Vice President, becoming the first PR practitioner with a corporate VP title and establishing the principle that communications leadership belongs in the boardroom alongside finance and legal. His seven principles of corporate communications remain foundational to the Page Society, the professional body for chief communications officers.

Beat · 1947

The Public Relations Society of America was formed by merging the American Council on Public Relations and the National Association of Public Relations Councils. It was the first national professional body specifically for PR practitioners, established its first code of professional standards in 1950, and by 1981 had grown from fewer than 5,000 to 9,000 members.

Beat · 1982

The Tylenol cyanide crisis in Chicago killed seven people and threatened to destroy Johnson and Johnson's most profitable product. CEO James Burke's immediate nationwide recall of 31 million bottles, combined with transparent media engagement and the introduction of tamper-evident packaging, became the defining case study in crisis communications. It is taught in business schools worldwide and transformed the perceived value of PR management within corporate hierarchies.

Beat · 2011

ProPublica analysis of BLS data documented that the ratio of PR practitioners to journalists had inverted from roughly 1:1 in 1980 to more than 3:1 by 2008 (0.90 PR workers vs. 0.25 journalists per 100,000 population), with the gap accelerating as newspaper advertising revenue collapsed. PR managers had become structural intermediaries filling the information vacuum left by shrinking newsrooms.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

How it began · 1900

In 1900, a group of Harvard-educated journalists opened the Publicity Bureau in Boston, charging corporations a fee to place favorable stories with newspapers. It was a modest operation, but it named something that had been nameless: the commercial management of organizational reputation. The real birth of the role as a recognizable profession, however, belongs to the decade that followed. In 1903 Ivy Ledbetter Lee took his first publicity job at the Citizens Union in New York City; in 1905 he co-founded Parker and Lee, the nation's third PR firm, with George Parker. Then came 1906 and the Atlantic City rail disaster, in which a Pennsylvania Railroad train plunged into a drawbridge over Thoroughfare Creek, killing fifty-three passengers. Lee persuaded the railroad's management to do something almost unheard of for a corporation of that era: invite journalists to the crash site and provide them with accurate, timely information. He formalized the principle in his Declaration of Principles, the first written statement that a PR practitioner has a public responsibility extending beyond obligations to the client. "This is not a secret press bureau," the declaration read. "All our work is done in the open." By 1912 Lee was hired as a full-time executive by the Pennsylvania Railroad, the first known instance of a PR practitioner placed at the management level of a major corporation. By 1914 he was advising John D. Rockefeller Jr. on how to respond to the Ludlow Massacre. Arthur Page joined AT&T as vice president in 1927, establishing the precedent that the communications function belonged in the corporate boardroom, not just the press room. Edward Bernays, applying his uncle Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic vocabulary to corporate persuasion, taught the first college PR course at New York University in 1923 and wrote the first textbook the same year. By 1930, the first trade association for the field had formed; by 1947, the Public Relations Society of America brought those associations together into a national professional body with its own code of ethics. The occupation had graduated from press agentry to a recognized management discipline.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace public relations managers? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say

Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

→ 2035

+5.7%

BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 11-2032 (Public relations managers): 80.8 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 85.4 thousand in 2035, a change of +4.6 thousand (+5.7%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (0.4% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.

Official statisticReport an error

How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)

Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.

Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"

2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)

57.5%

of tasks

What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 11-2032.00 Public Relations Managers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.575, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.25 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.9; GPT-4-rated β 0.55. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error

Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for public relations managers

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereDirect AI-powered media intelligence operations, configuring brand monitoring parameters in CisionOne or Meltwater Mira across 400,000+ news sources and social channels, setting alert thresholds for sentiment shifts and competitor share-of-voice changes, reviewing AI-generated insight reports for strategic implications, and translating coverage trends into quarterly narrative adjustments for leadership.

Direct AI-powered media intelligence operations, configuring brand monitoring parameters in CisionOne or Meltwater Mira across 400,000+ news sources and social channels, setting alert thresholds for sentiment shifts and competitor share-of-voice changes, reviewing AI-generated insight reports for strategic implications, and translating coverage trends into quarterly narrative adjustments for leadership.^{[10],[11],[12]}

Tools picking this up

CisionOne AI Suite ↗Meltwater Mira AI ↗Brand24 AI Media Monitoring ↗

Where your edge is

AI monitors at scale you could never match manually, but it misses context and irony. Review AI-flagged sentiment anomalies personally before escalating to leadership; train your team to layer organizational context onto AI-generated insight reports. Quarterly share-of-voice benchmarking against competitors is now AI-generated; your value is the strategic interpretation and the "so what" for the C-suite.

AI is sitting alongside you hereOwn PR measurement and executive reporting, directing the AI-powered analytics stack (CisionOne, Prowly) to auto-generate monthly coverage dashboards with reach, sentiment, and share-of-voice metrics, then interpreting results for the C-suite and board: connecting earned media trends to business outcomes such as sales pipeline, investor sentiment, and brand equity, and presenting ROI justification for communications investment.

Own PR measurement and executive reporting, directing the AI-powered analytics stack (CisionOne, Prowly) to auto-generate monthly coverage dashboards with reach, sentiment, and share-of-voice metrics, then interpreting results for the C-suite and board: connecting earned media trends to business outcomes such as sales pipeline, investor sentiment, and brand equity, and presenting ROI justification for communications investment.^{[13],[10],[5]}

Tools picking this up

CisionOne AI Suite ↗Prowly AI Assistant ↗

Where your edge is

AI generates the metrics; your value is the narrative that connects them to business results. Build financial fluency: learn to express PR outcomes in terms the CFO and board track, pipeline influence, cost-per-earned-impression versus paid CPM, and share-of-voice versus market share correlation. Executives trust communications leaders who speak in business outcomes, not clip counts.

AI is sitting alongside you hereGovern the organization's AI-assisted content production pipeline, briefing AI tools (Prowly, Jasper) with story angles and organizational context, reviewing AI-generated press release drafts for strategic framing and brand consistency, approving thought leadership pieces and executive bylines before distribution, and maintaining the editorial standards that ensure all published content reflects organizational narrative and clears legal review.

Govern the organization's AI-assisted content production pipeline, briefing AI tools (Prowly, Jasper) with story angles and organizational context, reviewing AI-generated press release drafts for strategic framing and brand consistency, approving thought leadership pieces and executive bylines before distribution, and maintaining the editorial standards that ensure all published content reflects organizational narrative and clears legal review.^{[14],[15],[6]}

Tools picking this up

Prowly AI Assistant ↗Jasper AI ↗CisionOne AI Suite ↗

Where your edge is

AI compresses first-draft time from hours to minutes: use that time savings to invest in strategic framing and approval quality. Build an editorial governance framework: a brand voice guide, a legal escalation checklist, and a pre-publish standards review that your AI-assisted team follows. The bottleneck has shifted from drafting to judgment about what should be published and how it will land.

Where public relations managers go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

Marketing Managers
US median pay
$166,790 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+6.9%
Management Analysts
US median pay
$101,860 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+10.1%
Public Relations Specialists
US median pay
$74,750 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+1.8%

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Marketing Managers

PR Managers already own brand narrative, executive messaging, and stakeholder communications: the strategic core that marketing strategy depends on. The pivot works best for PR leaders who have built strong relationships with the marketing function and want to expand into paid channels, demand generation, and revenue attribution. AI is compressing the traditional gap between earned media and paid media management; integrated "communications + marketing" director roles are growing at mid-market and enterprise companies. The primary skill gap is paid media budget ownership and performance marketing fluency.

What you'd add

· Paid media fundamentals: Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, programmatic DSPs
· Marketing attribution modeling (UTM tracking, multi-touch, MMM)
· CRM-based campaign performance tracking (HubSpot, Salesforce)
· Demand generation and pipeline influence measurement
· AI-assisted creative production governance (Adobe GenStudio, Jasper Campaign Brief Agent)

What it takesSome new skills to pick up

Tools of the era

How has the work of public relations managers changed since 1900?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

Press release + telephone (the birth of the craft)
Ivy Lee's 1906 press release after the Pennsylvania Railroad wreck was not just a communications tactic: it was the founding artifact of an entire occupation. Before the press release existed, organizations either refused to comment (the dominant posture of Gilded Age industrialists) or hired press agents to place puff pieces through back channels. Lee's Declaration of Principles proposed something radical: accuracy, transparency, and a direct channel from the organization to the journalist. The telephone, already ubiquitous in business by 1910, made the follow-up call possible. The combination of a prepared written statement delivered to multiple journalists simultaneously plus telephone availability for follow-up created the basic protocol that still governs earned media management today.
Effect on the work
The press release formalized the PR practitioner's function as a distinct professional role. Before it, the "publicity agent" was a hybrid figure, somewhere between journalist, lobbyist, and theatrical promoter. The press release defined the role's output, legitimized it in newsrooms, and gave practitioners a deliverable they could price.
Wire services + television (mass-media PR era)
The postwar period defined what it meant to manage a large organization's reputation in a mass media age. The wire services (AP, UPI) meant that a press release issued in New York could appear in newspapers across the country the same day. Television, which reached most American homes by 1960, introduced the visual dimension of reputation management: the executive who looked defensive or evasive on camera suffered in ways that a skilled print quote could not repair. PR managers adapted by adding media training, television prep, and crisis simulation to their toolkit. The period's signature event was the 1952 "Checkers speech," in which Richard Nixon used national television to survive a political crisis through direct emotional appeal, demonstrating to every communications professional watching that the medium had permanently changed the rules.
Effect on the work
Television dramatically increased the demand for senior PR management. Every corporation, politician, and major institution that appeared on screen needed someone to manage the appearance. By 1960, PRSA membership had reached 4,500 practitioners; it would grow to 9,000 by 1981.
Crisis communications playbook (Tylenol 1982 as inflection point)
On September 29, 1982, seven people in Chicago died after taking cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules. The product was Johnson and Johnson's most profitable, accounting for a sizeable share of its year-to-year profit growth. J&J Chairman James Burke immediately recalled tens of millions of bottles from store shelves, cooperated fully with media, established consumer hotlines, held press conferences, and communicated transparently throughout. Tylenol recovered most of its pre-crisis market share within a year. The response became the canonical model for crisis communications management and, perhaps more importantly for the profession, it became the proof case that the PR function was genuinely strategic rather than cosmetic: it had saved an organization from a potentially existential event. Business schools began teaching it within a decade; PR managers could now point to it when arguing for a seat at the executive table.
Effect on the work
The Tylenol case elevated the organizational status of the PR management function throughout the 1980s. Companies that had placed PR under marketing or public affairs began elevating the communications director to the executive level, in direct response to the argument that crisis management required C-suite access.
Email, the web, and the online newsroom (Internet era PR)
Email replaced fax as the primary channel for press release distribution by the mid-1990s, and Netscape's 1994 launch of the first commercial web browser opened a new surface: the corporate website and online newsroom. By 2000, most large organizations maintained digital press rooms where journalists could download releases, access high-resolution images, and find executive contacts directly, reducing dependence on the PR manager as an intermediary for basic information. The Internet era was a mixed shift for the role: it made PR managers' infrastructure work more efficient while simultaneously creating a new threat in the form of user-generated criticism. The first significant corporate online crises emerged in the late 1990s, as message boards and early websites amplified consumer complaints to audiences that traditional media had previously filtered.
Social media and the always-on news cycle (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube era)
Twitter launched in 2006; by 2008 it was reshaping how political and corporate crises played out in real time. The "always-on" news cycle created by social media fundamentally changed what PR management required. A corporate statement that once had a day to be finalized now had to be drafted in minutes. Journalists who once waited for official statements began quoting tweets from executives directly. The 2008 US presidential campaign demonstrated that social media had become a primary political communications platform. PR managers who had previously managed relationships with a defined roster of newspaper and broadcast journalists now had to monitor an effectively infinite stream of conversation across platforms where any individual could generate a story that reached millions.
Effect on the work
The social media era drove employment growth in PR management as organizations added dedicated digital communications roles. It also drove the first significant wave of in-house PR team expansion at technology companies, where the founders of Twitter, Facebook, and Google had built their entire businesses on platforms that operated as reputation amplifiers.
Media monitoring platforms (Cision, Meltwater, Muck Rack, Mention)
The generation of media intelligence platforms that consolidated in the 2010s, led by Cision, Meltwater, and Muck Rack, transformed the administrative workload of PR management. Manually compiling daily clip reports, tracking journalist coverage across dozens of publications, and measuring share of voice against competitors had previously required dedicated junior staff. Automated monitoring platforms did all of it at scale, at lower cost, and with sentiment analysis capabilities no human team could match. PR managers shifted from directing clip-report compilation to interpreting coverage dashboards, and the role's output emphasis moved from volume (number of placements) toward strategic measurement (share of voice, sentiment trend, correlation with business outcomes).
Effect on the work
Media monitoring platforms reduced demand for junior PR support roles while increasing the leverage of senior PR managers, who could now oversee coverage across vastly more channels with smaller teams. The automation-of-administration dynamic that would accelerate with AI in 2023 began in earnest with this generation of platforms.
Generative AI and agentic PR tools (Meltwater Mira, CisionOne AI, Muck Rack Media List Agent, Prowly AI)
The 2023-2026 generation of AI-powered PR platforms represents the deepest automation of execution tasks the profession has seen. Meltwater Mira (launched May 2025) monitors 270,000+ global news sources and generates AI-powered journalist profiles, coverage summaries, and crisis alerts via a conversational interface. CisionOne expanded its AI suite in September 2025 to include AI sentiment scoring across 400,000+ sources and shareable interactive insight reports. Muck Rack launched its Media List Agent in February 2026, using AI to recommend and rank journalists by pitch relevance. Prowly generates first-draft press releases in minutes from brief descriptions. PRSA's March 2026 survey found the majority of PR professionals were using AI daily. The impact on the management role is a further shift of execution to AI and concentration of human effort on strategy, crisis authority, and relationship capital. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) has emerged as a new surface: PR managers now manage how organizations appear in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity responses, not just in Google search.
Effect on the work
AI-native PR workflows can extend a PR manager's effective reach without proportional headcount increases. Whether this drives employment growth (more channels to manage) or contraction (fewer specialist-level staff needed per manager) remains an open question; the BLS growth projection through 2034 implies a modestly net-positive outcome.

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Public Relations Managers employment and pay by year

On record since1900

Latest US employment74,850 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Latest US median pay$146,910 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Outlook+5.7% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

View all 9 years of cited US data, each linked to its source

Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source	Report
1927	500	n/a	Est., PR Museum Researched context	Report
1947	5,000	n/a	Est., PRSA Milestones Researched context	Report
1980	41,000	$28,000	Est., ProPublica (employment) Researched contextEst., BLS National Survey of Professional (pay) Researched context	Report
2000	68,000	$54,540	BLS OEWS 2000 Official statistic	Report
2021	59,850	$125,780	BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic	Report
2022	64,280	$129,430	BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic	Report
2023	72,760	$134,760	BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic	Report
2024	76,060	$138,520	BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic	Report
2025	74,850	$146,910	BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic	Report

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See all roles in Management

Where public relations managers go next

Marketing Managers

Press release + telephone (the birth of the craft)Press release + telephone1900–1947

Wire services + television (mass-media PR era)Wire services + television1947–1982

Crisis communications playbook (Tylenol 1982 as inflection point)Crisis communications playbook1982–1994

Email, the web, and the online newsroom (Internet era PR)Email1994–2006

Social media and the always-on news cycle (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube era)Social media2006–2015

Media monitoring platforms (Cision, Meltwater, Muck Rack, Mention)Media monitoring platforms2015–2023

Generative AI and agentic PR tools (Meltwater Mira, CisionOne AI, Muck Rack Media List Agent, Prowly AI)Generative AI2023–present

Public Relations Managers employment and pay by year

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