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Human resources managers

Also called HR manager, HR director, Director of human resources, VP of people, Vice president of human resources

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 220,660 US human resources managers, with median pay of $149,280 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2012, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 25,000 from 1928, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for human resources managers: Cloud HCM + talent management platforms, 1999 to 2020.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 5.5% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

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. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Human resources managers: jobs and pay since 1928 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-3121

Chicago

Future History. "Human resources managers: jobs and pay since 1928." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-3121.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_11_3121, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Human resources managers: jobs and pay since 1928}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-3121}}, 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
1925195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Welfare Secretary / Welfare Officer (industrial betterment era)
Known then as Employment Manager / Labour Manager / Personnel Director (scientific management era)
Known then as Personnel Manager (New Deal labor-relations era)
Known then as Personnel Manager / Director of Personnel (civil rights compliance era)
Known then as Human Resources Manager / HR Director (strategic HR rebranding era)
Known then as Human Resources Managers (BLS SOC 11-3121)
Known today as Human Resources Managers (BLS SOC 11-3121)
Projected to still be called Human Resources Managers (BLS SOC 11-3121)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
221K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$149,280
Est.

≈ $145,453 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1901

Workers at the National Cash Register Company in Dayton, Ohio, go on strike. NCR founder John H. Patterson responds by creating one of the first formal personnel departments in the United States -- a dedicated office charged with hiring, training, grievance handling, and supervisor development. The department is modeled on NCR's existing employee welfare programs (hot lunches, good lighting, recreational clubs) but now has institutional authority and professional staff. It sets the organizational template that will spread across American industry over the following quarter-century.

Beat · 1917

Robert Yerkes and colleagues develop the Army Alpha and Beta intelligence tests for the US Army in August 1917; the tests are ultimately administered to over 1.75 million soldiers. Walter Dill Scott's Committee on the Classification of Personnel employs 7,000 specialists who classify more than 3 million men. When the war ends in 1918, these specialists carry structured psychological assessment, job classification, and aptitude testing into American industry. The Army testing program is the single largest expansion of personnel management capacity in American history before WWII and the immediate precursor to the 1920s professionalization of the field.

Beat · 1935

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, also called the Wagner Act) is signed into law on July 5, 1935. It establishes the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively and creates the National Labor Relations Board to enforce it. For personnel managers, the NLRA is a fundamental expansion of the job: overnight, the role acquires significant legal liability and requires detailed knowledge of collective bargaining, union avoidance, and grievance arbitration. A personnel manager who mishandles a union organizing campaign can expose the company to NLRB injunctions and back-pay orders. The NLRA effectively mandates a legally sophisticated personnel function at every large employer.

Beat · 1948

The American Society for Personnel Administration (ASPA) is founded on November 21, 1948, by 28 individuals who anticipated the need for a national organization representing the personnel profession. The organization begins with an all-volunteer staff and holds its first annual conference in Cleveland. ASPA will grow into the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) after a 1989 name change, eventually reaching over 320,000 members. The 1948 founding marks the professionalization of personnel management as a field with national standards, shared best practices, and a credentialing infrastructure.

Beat · 1954

Peter Drucker publishes "The Practice of Management" and introduces the term "human resources" to a business audience for the first time. Drucker argues that human resources are comparable to other resources but possess unique qualities -- the ability to coordinate, integrate, judge, and imagine -- and that managers must consider the moral, social, and developmental needs of the people they employ. The book initiates a three-decade conceptual shift from "personnel management" (administrative, compliance-focused) to "human resource management" (strategic, investment-focused). SHRM does not formally adopt the "human resources" framing until its 1989 name change, but the conceptual groundwork is laid here.

Beat · 1964

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act is signed into law on July 2, 1964, prohibiting employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. The EEOC is created and begins operations in 1965. For personnel managers, Title VII is the single most consequential piece of legislation in the profession's history: it creates a permanent, legally enforceable obligation to ensure that every employment decision -- hiring, promotion, compensation, termination -- is defensible on non-discriminatory grounds. EEOC investigation becomes a permanent feature of the HR manager's risk landscape. By the late 1960s, virtually every large employer has an Equal Employment Opportunity function housed within the personnel department.

Beat · 1987

PeopleSoft is founded by Dave Duffield and Ken Morris; version 1 of the client-server HRMS is released in 1989. It is the first HR software application built from the ground up on HR business requirements rather than as a financial ERP add-on. PeopleSoft's ability to automate payroll, benefits administration, job requisitions, and compliance reporting on a desktop marks the beginning of the administrative automation of the HR manager's department. SAP HR modules (integrated since R/2 in 1979 but widely deployed through the 1990s) perform the same function for larger enterprises. The automation of the administrative layer is what enables -- and eventually forces -- the strategic repositioning of HR from a compliance function to a business partner.

Beat · 2023

NYC Local Law 144 takes effect on July 5, 2023, requiring employers to conduct annual third-party bias audits of automated employment decision tools (AEDTs) used in hiring or promotion, and to notify candidates when such tools are used. It is the first municipal law in the United States to create specific audit and disclosure requirements for AI in hiring. HR managers in covered New York City employers become responsible for selecting and governing the audit vendor, reviewing findings, and implementing remediation plans. The law establishes the template that California (ADS Regulations, October 2025) and Illinois (Human Rights Act amendments, 2026) will expand on at the state level.

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 human resources 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
+5.5%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 11-3121 (Human resources managers): 224.9 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 237.4 thousand in 2035, a change of +12.5 thousand (+5.5%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (0.2% 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)
45%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 11-3121.00 Human Resources Managers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.45, 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) 0.14 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.76; GPT-4-rated β 0.48. 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 human resources managers

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

AI is sitting alongside you hereDirect the HR department's operating model transformation in response to AI: oversee Moveworks or ServiceNow HR Agent deployment to absorb tier-1 employee inquiries, measure the HR team's capacity liberated by automation, redeploy specialist bandwidth toward higher-value advisory work, and track the adoption and accuracy of AI service agents, serving as the accountable owner when AI gives employees wrong policy guidance.

Direct the HR department's operating model transformation in response to AI: oversee Moveworks or ServiceNow HR Agent deployment to absorb tier-1 employee inquiries, measure the HR team's capacity liberated by automation, redeploy specialist bandwidth toward higher-value advisory work, and track the adoption and accuracy of AI service agents, serving as the accountable owner when AI gives employees wrong policy guidance.[7],[11],[12]

Where your edge is

The HR Manager who proactively engineers this transition, rather than waiting for it to happen, controls the narrative and retains team headcount by demonstrating the strategic value unlocked. Build change-management skills and a clear framework for measuring what AI handles vs. what requires a human; the manager's credibility depends on the AI service layer being accurate and auditable.

AI is sitting alongside you hereGovern the employee-listening and performance-management system: configure Workday Peakon AI Topics or Culture Amp to run continuous engagement pulse surveys, review AI-generated thematic summaries of employee sentiment at scale, identify flight-risk signals requiring personal manager outreach, and use performance-trend analytics to make promotion, PIP, and succession decisions, the AI surfaces patterns, the manager acts on them.

Govern the employee-listening and performance-management system: configure Workday Peakon AI Topics or Culture Amp to run continuous engagement pulse surveys, review AI-generated thematic summaries of employee sentiment at scale, identify flight-risk signals requiring personal manager outreach, and use performance-trend analytics to make promotion, PIP, and succession decisions, the AI surfaces patterns, the manager acts on them.[8],[13],[4]

Where your edge is

Employee-listening AI compresses the data collection and thematic analysis; the manager's value is in acting on the signal, having the difficult conversations with business-unit leaders about engagement gaps, championing organizational changes based on evidence, and interpreting sentiment data with contextual knowledge of the org culture that the AI cannot hold. The manager who can translate Peakon themes into a credible action plan for the CHRO is indispensable.

AI is sitting alongside you hereDirect the enterprise talent acquisition function: select and govern the ATS and sourcing AI tools (Workday Recruiter Agent, Phenom Workforce Intelligence), set the job-family and sourcing-strategy framework, approve AI-screening criteria and adverse-impact thresholds, and hold vendors accountable when algorithm audits surface disparate outcomes, personally signing off on the annual third-party audit report.

Direct the enterprise talent acquisition function: select and govern the ATS and sourcing AI tools (Workday Recruiter Agent, Phenom Workforce Intelligence), set the job-family and sourcing-strategy framework, approve AI-screening criteria and adverse-impact thresholds, and hold vendors accountable when algorithm audits surface disparate outcomes, personally signing off on the annual third-party audit report.[14],[15],[16]

Where your edge is

The sourcing and screening execution is increasingly delegated to AI; the manager's value shifts to vendor governance and system design, setting the criteria, auditing the outcomes, and being the human who can override the algorithm when it is wrong. EEOC enforcement makes the manager personally accountable for the system's outputs even when a vendor provides the algorithm. Build vendor contract language requiring audit rights and adverse-impact data transparency.

Where human resources managers go next

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

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Chief Executives

HR Managers who develop P&L accountability, cross-functional executive credibility, and a demonstrated track record of transforming people strategy into measurable business outcomes are natural CHRO candidates, and CHROs are increasingly in the succession pipeline for CEO at people-intensive businesses (professional services, healthcare, financial services). Bersin's 2026 imperatives explicitly frame the CHRO role as expanding in scope as AI absorbs HR execution, positioning the function as the architect of the human-digital workforce. The transition is high difficulty for most paths but well-documented for organizations where people are the primary competitive asset.

What you'd add
· Board governance: presenting to the board, managing compensation-committee relationships, proxy-statement literacy
· M&A strategy: leadership through acquisition integration at an enterprise scale
· External stakeholder management: investor relations, major customer relationships, public-company communications
· CHRO-to-CEO track development: seek COO or divisional GM experience to build the operating credential
What it takesA real upskill, but a natural one
Tools of the era

How has the work of human resources managers changed since 1901?

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

  • Paper ledger + welfare secretary model (pre-WWI personnel administration)

    The first personnel departments at NCR, Cadbury, and similar progressive employers operated with no specialized technology: paper ledgers tracked employees, grievance cases were recorded by hand, hiring decisions were documented in letter form. The welfare secretary's tools were relational and administrative: personal conversations, written policies distributed on paper, and direct supervisor training. NCR's personnel department in 1901 established the pattern that would persist for decades: a dedicated organizational unit with authority over hiring, grievance resolution, and employee welfare, run by a professional manager whose value was judgment and knowledge of employment practice, not technical skill.

  • Psychological testing + job classification (Army Alpha/Beta legacy, scientific management era)

    The Army Alpha and Beta intelligence tests, developed by Robert Yerkes and colleagues in 1917 and administered to over 1.75 million soldiers, proved that structured psychological assessment could sort large populations of workers into appropriate roles at scale. When Walter Dill Scott's 7,000-strong Committee on the Classification of Personnel demobilized in 1919, they carried systematic job classification, aptitude testing, and structured interview methods into American industry. Frederick Taylor's scientific management framework gave the returning specialists a theoretical vocabulary. By the 1920s, corporate personnel departments were using standardized application forms, reference checks, structured job descriptions, and rudimentary psychometric assessments -- tools that made the personnel manager's function empirically grounded rather than purely intuitive for the first time.

    Effect on the work

    The professionalization of personnel testing expanded the scope and staffing of personnel departments significantly. By 1928, one-third of US plants with hundreds of workers had a formal personnel department, up from a handful in 1905.

  • Labor relations compliance infrastructure (NLRA, FLSA, grievance arbitration systems)

    The National Labor Relations Act (1935) and the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) transformed the personnel manager's role from welfare coordinator to legal compliance officer. Every covered employer now needed someone who understood the NLRB, knew how to respond to union organizing campaigns, could negotiate and administer collective bargaining agreements, and could document disciplinary actions in a way that would hold up in arbitration. The personnel manager became the interface between the organization and a federal regulatory apparatus that had the power to enjoin operations, impose back-pay awards, and compel reinstatement of terminated workers. This compliance mandate created a durable institutional rationale for the role that no amount of administrative automation could eliminate.

    Effect on the work

    The NLRA and FLSA significantly expanded the workforce of personnel departments across unionized industries. The 1940s war-production economy accelerated this: federal contracts required welfare and personnel functions in defense plants, standardizing the profession across industrial America.

  • EEOC compliance systems + Equal Employment Opportunity officer function (Civil Rights Act era)

    Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the creation of the EEOC in 1965 added a new layer of legal accountability to the personnel function that proved permanent. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act (1978) and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (1967) expanded the compliance surface further. Personnel managers became the organization's designated compliance officers -- the person who filed EEO-1 reports, reviewed job descriptions for discriminatory criteria, managed EEOC charge responses, and trained supervisors on non-discrimination obligations. This was not administrative work that could be delegated to a clerk; it required genuine legal knowledge and organizational authority to override line managers when hiring decisions were discriminatory.

    Effect on the work

    The civil rights compliance mandate drove a large expansion of personnel department staffing across the 1965-1980 period. Estimated personnel manager headcount roughly doubled from approximately 60,000 (1950) to 120,000 (1970) and continued growing through the 1970s.

  • HRIS / PeopleSoft + SAP HR modules (client-server human resources information systems)

    PeopleSoft version 1, released in 1987-1989, was the first fully integrated client-server human resources management system built specifically for HR rather than as a module bolted onto a financial ERP. SAP R/2 had integrated HR functions in 1979 but was mainframe-based and finance-led. PeopleSoft's client-server architecture meant that HR managers at mid-to-large organizations could run payroll, track benefits eligibility, manage job requisitions, and produce compliance reports from a desktop for the first time. The effect on the personnel manager's role was structural: the administrative coordination tasks that had consumed most of the department's time -- tracking employee records, processing payroll changes, maintaining benefits enrollment -- shifted to software. This freed HR managers to reposition toward the strategic, judgmental work that software could not do: workforce planning, organizational design, investigations, and executive-level people strategy. It is not coincidental that the rebranding from "personnel" to "human resources" accelerated in the late 1980s and early 1990s precisely as HRIS systems absorbed the clerical layer.

    Effect on the work

    HRIS automation reduced the ratio of HR staff to employees at large organizations, but did not reduce HR manager headcount overall -- it changed what managers did. The measured headcount is not comparable across the 2003 SOC reclassification, which narrowed the category: BLS OEWS counts from 2003 on reflect the narrower definition, not an actual decline.

  • Cloud HCM + talent management platforms (Workday 2005, SuccessFactors 2001, SaaS talent stack)

    Workday was founded in 2005 by former PeopleSoft executives Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, specifically to build a cloud-native HR platform that could replace the on-premise PeopleSoft and SAP installations that had become expensive and difficult to maintain. SuccessFactors (2001), Taleo (2000), and Cornerstone OnDemand (1999) built out the talent management layer: performance management, learning management, and applicant tracking systems as standalone SaaS tools. The cloud talent stack of the early 2000s meant that HR managers at organizations of any size could now access enterprise-grade performance management, learning, and recruiting tools without a multi-million-dollar ERP implementation. The HR manager's role shifted again: from administering a system of record to governing an ecosystem of specialized vendors, interpreting analytics dashboards, and making strategic decisions using data that the platforms surfaced automatically.

  • AI HR agents + algorithmic compliance governance (Workday Illuminate, Visier, EEOC AI enforcement era)

    The 2020s brought two simultaneous pressures on the HR manager role. First, the AI tool layer: Workday Illuminate (generally available September 2025) expanded with AI agents for organizational design scenario modeling, workforce demand forecasting, and AI-powered employee listening via Peakon AI Topics. Visier Org Design (HR Tech 2025) turned spreadsheet org charts into interactive scenario models with narrated AI impact analysis. Moveworks and ServiceNow HR Agent absorbed a large share of tier-1 employee inquiries without HR staff involvement. Josh Bersin forecast in January 2026 that AI superagents would automate about a hundred core HR processes in 2026. Second, the compliance layer multiplied: the EEOC's FY 2024-2028 Strategic Enforcement Plan explicitly named algorithmic hiring discrimination as an enforcement priority. NYC Local Law 144 (effective July 2023) required third-party bias audits of automated employment decision tools. California's Automated Decisionmaking Regulations (effective October 2025) and Illinois's Human Rights Act amendments (2026) both named HR managers as the accountable humans who must be able to override AI employment decisions. The dual pressure -- AI absorbing the administrative layer while compliance expanding the accountability surface -- is the structural pattern that has defined the HR manager's role in every technology era since 1901. The current moment is the most compressed version of that cycle so far.

    Effect on the work

    Despite AI automation of significant administrative HR tasks, BLS projects HR manager employment to grow 5% from 2024 to 2034 -- faster than the all-occupations average. The compliance accountability layer created by AI governance requirements appears to be absorbing any reduction from administrative automation.

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Human Resources Managers employment and pay by year

On record since1901
Latest US employment220,660 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$149,280 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+5.5% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • Canada (NOC 10011)

    Employment, 2020
    50,390, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 10011 Human resources managers, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
    Median pay, 2020
    C$99,000, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 10011 Human resources managers, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.
View all 22 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
192825,000n/aEst., Climbtheladder.com Researched contextReport
195060,000n/aDecennial Census 1950 Researched contextReport
1956n/a$7,200Est., Approximate median annual earnings for… Researched contextReport
1970120,000n/aDecennial Census 1970 Researched contextReport
1975n/a$20,000Est., EEOC History Researched contextReport
1990195,000n/aEst., Wikipedia Researched contextReport
201067,700$99,180BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
201181,750$99,130BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
201298,020$99,720BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
2013110,650$100,800BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
2014116,610$102,780BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015122,780$104,440BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016129,810$106,910BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017136,310$110,120BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018143,580$113,300BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019154,800$116,720BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020156,600$121,220BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021166,530$126,230BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022181,360$130,000BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023200,600$136,350BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024215,520$140,030BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025220,660$149,280BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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