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Administrative services managers

Also called Administrative manager, Office manager, Director of administrative services, Facilities manager, Administrative director

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 263,960 US administrative services managers, with median pay of $114,130 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 150,000 from 1900, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for administrative services managers: Hybrid workplace platforms, 2020 to 2024.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 5.2% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

  • 32% of work tasks in management occupations, this job's group, are exposed to automation by AI. Not a forecast of job losses. Goldman Sachs, 2023
  • 50% 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 .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Administrative services managers: jobs and pay since 1900 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-3012

Chicago

Future History. "Administrative services managers: jobs and pay since 1900." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-3012.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_11_3012, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Administrative services managers: jobs and pay since 1900}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-3012}}, 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
187519001925195019752000now
2026
Known then as Office Superintendent / Chief Clerk (late 19th-century corporate era)
Known then as Office Manager / Administrative Manager (Taylor-era formalization)
Known then as Office Manager / Administrative Services Manager (post-ASPA professionalization era)
Known then as Administrative Services Manager / Facilities Manager (pre-SOC-merge)
Known then as Administrative Services Managers (BLS SOC 11-3012, merged with Facilities Managers)
Known today as Administrative Services Managers (BLS SOC 11-3012, merged with Facilities Managers)
Projected to still be called Administrative Services Managers (BLS SOC 11-3012, merged with Facilities Managers)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
264K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$114,130
Est.

≈ $111,204 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1873

Remington begins commercial production of the Sholes and Glidden typewriter on March 1, 1873. Within a decade the typewriter is standard in American corporate offices, creating typing pools that require dedicated supervision and catalyzing the demand for office managers as a distinct occupational layer above clerical workers. The typewriter is the first technology that makes the administrative management function economically necessary at scale: when correspondence is handwritten, a single proprietor-owner can oversee it directly; when a firm employs a typing pool of 20, someone has to manage the flow.

Beat · 1916

Henri Fayol publishes "Administration Industrielle et Generale" in French (1916), providing the first systematic theoretical framework for administrative management as a distinct function. Fayol's five functions of management (planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, controlling) define the administrative manager's domain in terms that remain recognizable in the modern 11-3012 job description. Fayol was director of a French mining conglomerate; he was describing a role that already existed in large organizations, not inventing it. The Storrs English translation (1949) brought his framework to American business schools and formalized its influence on US administrative management practice.

Beat · 1942

The National Secretaries Association (NSA) is founded in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1942, the first professional association specifically for administrative support professionals. The NSA administered the first Certified Professional Secretary examination in 1951. The organization would later rename itself Professional Secretaries International (1982) and then the International Association of Administrative Professionals (1998), the name evolution tracking the field's shift from a primarily secretarial identity toward the broader administrative management function. The founding year of 1942 marks the point at which the administrative profession had sufficient scale and coherence to sustain a national membership organization.

Beat · 1961

IBM launches the Selectric typewriter in 1961 with its signature interchangeable typeball mechanism. The Selectric would remain the dominant office typewriter for two decades and became the standard tool of the professional typing pool. Its introduction is the high-water mark of the typing-pool era: after the Selectric, office correspondence quality and volume reached their peak, and the administrative services manager's coordination role was at its most labor-intensive relative to the size of the organizations it served. Within 20 years, the personal computer would begin dismantling the typing-pool model entirely.

Beat · 1981

IBM launches the IBM Personal Computer on August 12, 1981. Lotus 1-2-3 (1983) and WordPerfect bring spreadsheet and word processing to the administrative manager's desk directly. The PC transforms the administrative manager from a supervisor of clerical workers who use machines into a user of the machines themselves. By the late 1980s, corporate typing pools are shrinking as executives and managers draft their own correspondence. The administrative manager's job description begins shifting from paper-flow governance toward platform governance: managing the systems rather than managing the people who operate the systems.

Beat · 2010

The 2010 revision of the BLS Standard Occupational Classification merges the former SOC 11-3011 (Administrative Services Managers) and 11-3021 (Facilities Managers) into a combined 11-3012. The merge reflects the operational reality of mid-size organizations where the administrative services manager typically holds responsibility for both office support services and physical facilities. Large organizations still bifurcate the roles into a dedicated Facilities Director and an Administrative Services Director; the SOC merge acknowledges that at the organizational median, one manager holds both portfolios.

Beat · 2020

COVID-19 forces nearly all US office workers into remote work beginning March 2020. Administrative services managers become the operational leads for a workplace transformation: renegotiating leases as companies shed office space, implementing desk-hoteling systems for hybrid return-to-office protocols, managing supply chains for home-office equipment, and redesigning facilities for reduced on-site headcount. The hybrid work transition would prove more durable than most firms initially expected: by 2024-25, a majority of US office workers operate on some form of hybrid schedule, requiring ongoing facilities governance at lower occupancy levels rather than the one-time transition many organizations anticipated. This sustained complexity has been a driver of continued demand for experienced administrative managers despite overall administrative function automation.

Beat · 2023

Microsoft 365 Copilot launches to enterprise customers in November 2023, offering AI-assisted drafting, meeting summarization, and spreadsheet analysis directly within the Office suite. ServiceNow Now Assist and Asana AI launch comparable capabilities in Q3 and Q4 2023. These tools represent the first generative AI capabilities integrated into the core platforms administrative managers already use daily. Goldman Sachs (2023) identifies office and administrative support tasks as carrying the highest AI task-exposure of any major occupational group. The American Society of Administrative Professionals (ASAP) notes in its 2026 report that interpersonal strengths are becoming the primary differentiator for administrative professionals as AI absorbs routine coordination tasks, a finding consistent with the BLS growth projection.

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.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace administrative services 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
+5.2%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 11-3012 (Administrative services managers): 279.0 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 293.3 thousand in 2035, a change of +14.4 thousand (+5.2%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (1% 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)
50%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 11-3012.00 Administrative Services Managers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.5, 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) 0.261 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.739; GPT-4-rated β 0.391. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Goldman Sachs (Briggs & Kodnani, 2023), "The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth"
2023 study · Share of work tasks exposed to automation by AI, all management occupations (US)
32%
of tasks
What this measures

Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research scored the task content of each US occupation for exposure to automation by generative AI and weighted by OEWS employment. Exhibit 5 (US panel) reports 32% for management occupations, the occupational group this role belongs to; the report publishes no figure for individual occupations. It measures how much of the group's work AI could automate, not how many jobs disappear, and it is a 2023 estimate, not a forecast for a later year.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for administrative services managers

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

AI is sitting alongside you herePrepare and review operational reports using Microsoft 365 Copilot to draft budget variance summaries, supply-cost analyses, and department performance briefs from raw spreadsheet data -- then verify figures against source records, add organizational context Copilot cannot supply, and present to senior leadership with confident commentary on what the numbers mean for resource allocation.

Prepare and review operational reports using Microsoft 365 Copilot to draft budget variance summaries, supply-cost analyses, and department performance briefs from raw spreadsheet data -- then verify figures against source records, add organizational context Copilot cannot supply, and present to senior leadership with confident commentary on what the numbers mean for resource allocation.[1],[6]

Where your edge is

The AI handles assembly; your edge is interpretation. Build the habit of reading AI-drafted reports critically -- Copilot can miss the story in the data (a cost spike that reflects a one-time equipment purchase, not a recurring inefficiency). The managers who add the most value are those who understand the operational context behind the numbers well enough to confidently push back or reinforce what the data suggests.

AI is sitting alongside you hereGovern supply chain and records compliance -- configuring procurement automation to trigger reorder workflows, route approvals, and track vendor delivery performance

Govern supply chain and records compliance -- configuring procurement automation to trigger reorder workflows, route approvals, and track vendor delivery performance; maintaining records retention policies (who owns what, how long it stays, how it gets disposed) that satisfy legal hold and regulatory requirements; and making the judgment calls when a business need requires an exception to standard retention or procurement rules, documented in a way that survives an audit.[1],[3]

Where your edge is

Records management and supply coordination are the parts of this role most likely to transition from a primary task to a policy-governance function. The admin manager who stays valuable here is the one who understands the compliance requirements deeply enough to configure the automation correctly -- not just approve the vendor's default settings. Build fluency in records retention regulations relevant to your industry (HIPAA, SOX, GDPR as applicable) so you can set the policies that govern the automation, rather than inheriting whatever the system default provides.

AI is sitting alongside you hereAdminister departmental budgets for contracts, equipment, and supplies -- using ServiceNow procurement automation and Microsoft 365 Copilot to flag invoice anomalies, generate spend-vs.-budget variance reports, and draft renewal recommendations

Administer departmental budgets for contracts, equipment, and supplies -- using ServiceNow procurement automation and Microsoft 365 Copilot to flag invoice anomalies, generate spend-vs.-budget variance reports, and draft renewal recommendations; then applying vendor-relationship knowledge and organizational priorities to decide which contracts to consolidate, which equipment refreshes to defer, and how to present budget requests that reflect operational reality rather than just line-item math.[7],[1]

Where your edge is

AI tools compress the data-aggregation and variance-explanation phases of budget management significantly. Your leverage shifts to vendor strategy: multi-year contract positioning, consolidation opportunities across vendors that the AI treats as separate line items, and the negotiation relationships that extract favorable terms. Build the habit of using AI-generated spend analytics as the starting point for a vendor strategy conversation, not just a reporting exercise.

Where administrative services managers go next

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

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

General and Operations Managers

Administrative Services Managers already perform the core work of operations management -- vendor oversight, budget administration, process improvement, staff coordination, and cross-departmental negotiation. The pivot to General and Operations Manager formalizes a broader scope (multiple departments, business-unit P&L, strategic planning) rather than introducing fundamentally new skills. The transition is most natural at organizations where the admin manager already has cross-functional visibility and has demonstrated business-outcome thinking rather than purely service-delivery thinking.

What you'd add
  • · P&L management: revenue modeling, cost-center vs. profit-center accounting, and business-unit financial governance
  • · Strategic planning: translating organizational goals into operational workplans with measurable milestones and resource requirements
  • · Cross-functional leadership: influencing and coordinating teams that do not report to you (sales, finance, HR) toward shared operational outcomes
  • · Data analysis: using Power BI or equivalent to build operational dashboards that connect activity metrics to business outcomes
  • · Executive communication: presenting operational performance and investment recommendations in the capital-allocation language that senior leaders use
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of administrative services managers changed since 1870?

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

  • Typewriter, stenography, and ledger system (early corporate bureaucracy)

    Remington began commercial typewriter production in 1873. By the 1880s the machine was standard in American offices, transforming what had been a craft of penmanship into a standardized clerical operation. For the emerging office manager, the typewriter was the first technology that demanded systematic supervision: typing pools required oversight, carbon-copy filing systems required policies, and the sheer volume of correspondence that a typing pool could generate required someone to manage the flow. The office manager's core job in this era was paper-flow governance: ensuring the right documents reached the right people through manual filing systems, physical mail routing, and supervision of clerical workers whose primary tool was the typewriter.

    Effect on the work

    Typewriter adoption expanded the clerical workforce dramatically. By 1900 the Census showed that 94.9% of stenographers and typists were women, a profound gender shift from the male-dominated counting-house clerks of the pre-typewriter era. The need to supervise these larger typing pools was a direct driver of demand for dedicated office managers.

  • Telephone switchboard, mimeograph, and dictaphone (mid-century office rationalization)

    The Bell telephone system reached near-universal urban business adoption by the 1920s, and by the 1930s corporate offices depended on internal telephone switchboards for coordination. The mimeograph machine (standard from the 1920s) enabled rapid reproduction of internal communications and policy documents for the first time without a printing press. The dictaphone (commercially available from the 1910s) separated the executive from the typist physically, with managers dictating correspondence onto cylinders that were transcribed by typing pools. For the administrative services manager, these tools multiplied the volume of communications and records that required coordination while also creating new categories of equipment to procure, maintain, and govern.

  • IBM Selectric typewriter, photocopier (Xerox 914, 1959), and mainframe time-sharing

    The IBM Selectric typewriter (1961) introduced the interchangeable typeball that could switch typefaces mid-document, elevating document production quality and enabling the professional correspondence norms that became standard in corporate America. The Xerox 914 photocopier (commercially launched 1959, reaching broad office adoption through the 1960s) transformed records management: for the first time, copying a document was a clerical act rather than a reprographic production job. The administrative manager's records governance problem became simultaneously easier (copies were cheap) and harder (the volume of documents requiring retention and retrieval expanded dramatically). IBM mainframe time-sharing in the 1960s began automating payroll and procurement computations in large firms, shifting some administrative coordination tasks from paper ledgers to computer-generated reports that the manager was now responsible for interpreting.

  • Personal computer and word processor (IBM PC 1981, Lotus 1-2-3 1983, WordPerfect)

    The IBM PC launched in August 1981. WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 reached broad corporate adoption by 1984-85. For the administrative services manager, the personal computer was the first technology that directly augmented (rather than merely supporting) the manager's own analytical work: spreadsheets enabled the manager to build and maintain budget tracking independently, rather than depending on a finance department or mainframe job. Word processing eliminated the typing-pool dependency for routine correspondence. The manager's role began shifting from paper-flow supervisor to platform operator: someone who needed to know how to use the software and teach it to their team.

    Effect on the work

    The PC and word processor began reducing typing-pool headcounts in large organizations through the late 1980s and early 1990s. Administrative managers supervised smaller direct clerical teams but gained broader span of coordination as software reduced the manual labor required per administrative task.

  • Email, Lotus Notes / Microsoft Exchange, and enterprise intranet

    Microsoft Exchange Server launched in 1996; corporate email reached near-universal office adoption in US enterprises by the late 1990s. For the administrative services manager, email transformed the work in two opposing directions simultaneously: it eliminated the physical mail routing and distribution function that had been a core operational task (the mailroom shrank), while creating an entirely new coordination medium that required its own governance. Policy development for email retention, acceptable use, and records archival became a significant administrative responsibility. The Lotus Notes and later SharePoint intranet platforms moved the filing cabinet into the network, making document management and records governance more complex at the same time as tools for addressing that complexity became available.

  • Enterprise SaaS platforms (SAP, PeopleSoft, ServiceNow, Workday)

    The shift from on-premise enterprise software (SAP R/3, PeopleSoft HCM) to cloud-delivered SaaS platforms through the 2000s and 2010s moved procurement, facilities ticketing, HR workflows, and records management into integrated systems that generated dashboards the administrative manager was expected to monitor and govern. ServiceNow, founded in 2004 and reaching enterprise scale through the 2010s, automated IT and facilities service requests in a way that reduced the manual coordination overhead of facilities management. Workday (2005) automated HR and procurement workflows. The administrative services manager's job evolved from supervising people doing coordination work to configuring and governing the platforms that did it automatically.

  • Hybrid workplace platforms (Microsoft Teams, Zoom, YAROOMS, Robin)

    The COVID-19 pandemic forced US offices into remote and then hybrid work between March 2020 and late 2022. Administrative services managers were the operational lead for this transition: reconfiguring space for reduced occupancy, managing lease renegotiations as companies shed square footage, implementing desk-hoteling systems (YAROOMS, Robin, Condeco) for flexible seating, and redesigning onboarding and supply distribution processes for workers who were never in the office on a fixed schedule. The hybrid work transition became the most significant facilities and administrative operations challenge most US organizations had faced since the consolidations of the 1990s, and it created sustained demand for experienced administrative managers who could navigate the organizational, vendor, and physical-space dimensions simultaneously.

  • Generative AI productivity layer (Microsoft 365 Copilot, ServiceNow Now Assist, Asana AI)

    Microsoft 365 Copilot launched to enterprise customers in November 2023. ServiceNow Now Assist launched initial generative AI features in Q3 2023 (Vancouver release) and expanded to Sourcing and Procurement Operations in September 2024 (Xanadu release). Asana AI Smart Status and Smart Summaries launched in October 2023. For the administrative services manager, these tools represent the steepest technology shift in a generation: operational report assembly, budget variance drafting, project status generation, and procurement workflow routing are all now AI-assisted in a way that compresses hours of coordination work to minutes. Goldman Sachs (2023) found office and administrative support tasks carry the highest AI task-exposure of any major occupational group at 46%. The administrative manager's role is shifting from performing coordination work to governing the AI-assisted platforms that perform it.

    Effect on the work

    Sign In App (2026) reported that UK administrative workers using AI tools save many hours per year on routine tasks. The BLS, despite this efficiency gain, projects employment growth through 2034 for 11-3012, suggesting that the judgment, personnel, and vendor-relationship layers of the role are absorbing the displaced coordination-task hours rather than eliminating positions.

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Administrative Services Managers employment and pay by year

On record since1870
Latest US employment263,960 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$114,130 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+5.2% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error
View all 9 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
1900150,000n/aEst., Wikipedia Researched contextReport
1929300,000n/aEst., Wikipedia Researched contextReport
1960400,000$7,200Est., Wikipedia (employment) Researched contextEst., University of Missouri Libraries (pay) Researched contextReport
2000344,440$47,080BLS OEWS 2000 Official statisticReport
2021224,620$100,170BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022236,570$103,330BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023242,520$106,470BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024254,140$108,390BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025263,960$114,130BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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