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Event planners

Official title Meeting, Convention, and Event Planners (SOC 13-1121)

Also called Meeting planner, Convention planner, Conference planner, Trade show planner, Corporate event planner

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 142,860 US event planners, with median pay of $61,160 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2012, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 15,000 from 1956, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for event planners: Virtual and hybrid event platforms, 2020 to 2022.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 5.8% 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). Event planners: jobs and pay since 1956 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/13-1121

Chicago

Future History. "Event planners: jobs and pay since 1956." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/13-1121.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_13_1121, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Event planners: jobs and pay since 1956}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/13-1121}}, 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
195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Convention Manager / Exposition Manager / Trade Show Director (trade association era)
Known then as Meeting Planner / Conference Coordinator (early professionalization era)
Known then as Meeting Planner / Convention Planner / Special Events Coordinator (MPI era)
Known then as Meeting Planner / Event Coordinator / Conference Manager (corporate meetings boom)
Known then as Meeting, Convention, and Event Planners (BLS SOC 13-1121)
Known today as Meeting, Convention, and Event Planners (BLS SOC 13-1121)
Projected to still be called Meeting, Convention, and Event Planners (BLS SOC 13-1121)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
143K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$61,160
Est.

≈ $59,592 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1928

The National Association of Exposition Managers is founded in the United States -- the organization that will later become the International Association of Exhibitions and Events (IAEE). This is the first professional association specifically for people whose full-time work is managing large-scale gatherings. It marks the beginning of event planning as an organized profession rather than an ad hoc function absorbed by hotel managers and civic promoters.

Beat · 1956

The Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA) is founded in Philadelphia by a group of healthcare association executives who run their own conventions and want a community for peer learning and standards development. PCMA will go on to become one of the two largest associations in the meetings industry, alongside MPI. Its founding in 1956 marks the emergence of a distinct professional identity for corporate and association meeting planners, separate from the exposition-manager tradition.

Beat · 1972

On June 12, 1972, 159 meeting professionals in Illinois vote to charter Meeting Planners International (MPI). The organization grows to become the largest global association for event professionals, with over 60,000 members and participants across 70+ chapters by the 2020s. MPI's founding represents the mainstreaming of "meeting planner" as a recognized career title across both corporate and association sectors.

Beat · 1985

The Events Industry Council (then the Convention Industry Council) launches the Certified Meeting Professional (CMP) credential -- the first formal certification for the meeting and event planning profession. The CMP program was designed to establish uniform knowledge standards, elevate the credibility of the profession, and provide planners with a portable credential analogous to the CPA in accounting or the PMP in project management. As of 2024, more than 13,000 meeting planners hold the CMP.

Beat · 1999

Cvent is founded in McLean, Virginia, launching the first web-based platform for corporate meeting planners to source hotels, manage attendee registration, and distribute RFPs online. Before Cvent, planners sent paper RFPs or made phone calls to properties individually; Cvent's supplier marketplace let a single planner contact dozens of hotels simultaneously. This begins the automation of the highest-volume transactional work in event planning and is the technology pivot point that separates the pre-digital from the digital era of the profession.

Beat · 2020

March 2020: the COVID-19 pandemic effectively eliminates all in-person events globally within weeks. By March 2020, 90% of event professionals reported that some or most of their business had disappeared. The industry adopted the description "first to go, last to come back." BLS OEWS employment for 13-1121 falls from 117,610 in May 2019 to 109,800 in May 2020 and 98,150 in May 2021. The pivot to virtual events prevented total industry extinction but could not replicate the ROI of in-person gatherings.

Beat · 2024

BLS OEWS May 2024 records 134,670 meeting, convention, and event planners in the United States -- a new all-time high, surpassing the 2019 pre-pandemic peak. Employment has grown roughly 15% above the 2019 level, driven by the return of in-person events, the growth of hybrid formats, and the pent-up demand from associations and corporations that deferred major gatherings during 2020-2022. Amex GBT's 2026 Meetings and Events Forecast finds optimism at a five-year high, with 50% of planners integrating AI tools into event delivery. The profession has absorbed one of the most severe disruptions in its history and emerged larger than before.

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 event planners? 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
+5.8%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 13-1121 (Meeting, convention, and event planners): 172.1 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 182.1 thousand in 2035, a change of +10.0 thousand (+5.8%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (10.1% 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)
36.5%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 13-1121.00 Meeting, Convention, and Event Planners. Shown: human-rated β = 0.365, 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) 0.081 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.649; GPT-4-rated β 0.486. 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 event planners

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

AI is sitting alongside you hereManage attendee registration and personalized communications using AI-powered event platforms, configuring Cvent Flex AI, Bizzabo, or Whova to automate confirmation emails, agenda personalization (matching sessions to registrant role/interest), day-of reminders, and post-event follow-up sequences

Manage attendee registration and personalized communications using AI-powered event platforms, configuring Cvent Flex AI, Bizzabo, or Whova to automate confirmation emails, agenda personalization (matching sessions to registrant role/interest), day-of reminders, and post-event follow-up sequences; monitoring AI-generated attendee journey workflows and handling exceptions the system escalates.[11],[12],[6]

Where your edge is

The registration and comms workflow is now almost fully automatable: your value shifts to the configuration and exception layer: designing the attendee journey logic, writing the brand voice guidelines the AI follows, and resolving the edge cases (VIP registration conflicts, dietary accommodation disputes, accessibility needs) that the system cannot handle gracefully. Invest in understanding your platform's automation rules deeply so you can optimize and troubleshoot, not just click "send."

AI is sitting alongside you hereGenerate event marketing content and promotional materials using AI writing tools: using CventIQ Writing Assistant or Splash AI templates to draft event landing page copy, speaker bios, email invitation sequences, and social media posts from a brief

Generate event marketing content and promotional materials using AI writing tools: using CventIQ Writing Assistant or Splash AI templates to draft event landing page copy, speaker bios, email invitation sequences, and social media posts from a brief; editing AI outputs for brand voice and accuracy; then approving final copy before publishing.[3],[13],[14]

Where your edge is

AI makes you a one-person content team for an event campaign, but the quality ceiling is your brief: vague inputs produce generic outputs that undermine your brand. Invest in prompt engineering for event marketing, learning to specify audience, tone, key differentiators, and call-to-action clearly. The skill gap between planners who use AI for content and those who don't is widening rapidly; the winners will be those who produce better-targeted communications for more events per quarter.

Get started with these tools
AI is sitting alongside you hereSource and qualify venues and vendors using AI-powered marketplace tools: using CventIQ natural-language venue search and Reposite PlanPilot to describe event requirements in plain language, receive AI-matched shortlists of venues and F&B/AV vendors within 24-48 hours, then review AI-ranked options against budget and client criteria before committing to site visits.

Source and qualify venues and vendors using AI-powered marketplace tools: using CventIQ natural-language venue search and Reposite PlanPilot to describe event requirements in plain language, receive AI-matched shortlists of venues and F&B/AV vendors within 24-48 hours, then review AI-ranked options against budget and client criteria before committing to site visits.[3],[15],[4]

Where your edge is

AI dramatically compresses the search-and-shortlist phase but the site-visit judgment (reading the room, assessing the venue captain's responsiveness, understanding which properties will go to bat for you on attrition) remains yours. Build a personal vendor network that AI cannot replicate; relationships with hotel GMs and catering directors produce negotiated outcomes (upgraded AV, comp room blocks, favorable attrition clauses) that no algorithm can generate.

Where event planners go next

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

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Marketing Managers

Corporate and brand event planners who manage large-scale conferences, product launches, and experiential marketing campaigns already operate at the intersection of events and marketing strategy. Marketing Managers who specialize in experiential or field marketing lean heavily on event-planning skills (venue management, vendor coordination, audience journey design) while adding brand strategy, budget ownership, and cross-functional leadership. AI is absorbing the logistics execution layer of event planning, making the remaining value increasingly strategic and brand-centric: exactly the Marketing Manager remit. This is the most natural upward pivot for planners at the mark with client-facing and budget ownership experience.

What you'd add
  • · Brand strategy and positioning: translating business objectives into experiential campaigns
  • · Marketing analytics: attribution modeling, event ROI, pipeline sourcing from events
  • · Budget ownership at scale: managing multi-million-dollar marketing budgets, not just event P&Ls
  • · Cross-functional leadership: briefing creative, digital, and PR teams on campaign strategy
  • · CRM and marketing automation (Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo) for event-to-pipeline tracking
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of event planners changed since 1928?

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

  • Paper ledger, telegram, and telephone (pre-professional era)

    The earliest event planners coordinated everything through paper: hand-written attendee lists, mailed correspondence with hotels and venues, typed programs, and physical floor plan drawings. The telegram handled urgent supplier communications; the telephone was transformative for real-time vendor coordination but was expensive and required routing through switchboards. A planner managing a major trade exposition in 1940 worked from physical card files of exhibitors, a paper contract binder, and a personally maintained contact book of hotel managers and convention bureau staff. There was no technological shortcut for any of this; the planner's value was embodied in their personal knowledge, their relationships, and their ability to hold the entire event in their head.

  • IBM Selectric typewriter, mainframe hotel reservation systems (early SABRE era)

    The IBM Selectric typewriter (introduced 1961) transformed the correspondence workload of meeting planners: proposal letters, contracts, and event programs could be produced professionally without secretarial outsourcing. More consequentially, hotel chains began deploying mainframe-based property management systems in the late 1960s and 1970s, starting with American Airlines' SABRE system (1960) and its hospitality-sector analogues. By the mid-1970s, major conference hotels could track room block availability and group booking status electronically, allowing planners to check room inventory without going through a manual call tree. The planning workflow was still paper-heavy, but the information infrastructure of the hotel industry began to modernize.

  • Personal computer and desktop productivity (Lotus 1-2-3, early DOS/Windows era)

    The personal computer arrived in meeting planning offices in the mid-1980s as a spreadsheet and word processing tool. Lotus 1-2-3 (launched 1983) and later Microsoft Excel made budget management -- the most time-consuming paper task for a planner -- into an interactive model that could be updated and shared. Word processing replaced the Selectric. The fax machine (widely adopted in the late 1980s) replaced the telegram for urgent contract exchanges. By the early 1990s, purpose-built event management software began to appear: companies like Cvent (founded 1999) would emerge from this era, but 1990s planners were largely combining generic spreadsheets, custom databases, and fax workflows to manage attendee registration and vendor coordination.

    Effect on the work

    The PC reduced the clerical overhead of event coordination -- registration lists could be sorted and updated in Excel rather than re-typed; budgets could be recalculated dynamically -- but did not change the fundamental human-intensive nature of vendor negotiation, on-site management, or client relationship work.

  • Web-based event management and online registration (Cvent 1999, Eventbrite 2006)

    Cvent launched in 1999 with the first web-based event management platform for corporate meeting planners -- online registration, hotel sourcing via a supplier marketplace, and electronic RFP distribution. Eventbrite followed in 2006, addressing the consumer and smaller-event segment. The shift to web-based registration eliminated the paper-and-phone registration workflow that had dominated for decades: attendees could register, pay, select sessions, and receive confirmations without any planner intervention. Hotel sourcing via Cvent's marketplace let planners send a single RFP to dozens of properties simultaneously and receive electronic responses, collapsing what had been a multi-week phone-and-fax process into days. This was the most consequential technology shift the profession had experienced: it automated the highest-volume transactional work and freed planners to concentrate on the higher-order coordination and creative work.

    Effect on the work

    Web-based registration and online RFP tools did not reduce the planner headcount but changed the composition of the job. Planners who adapted became more productive -- managing larger event portfolios with the same hours -- while planners who resisted found their administrative work increasingly difficult to justify.

  • Mobile event apps and real-time attendee engagement (DoubleDutch 2011, Whova, Bizzabo)

    The smartphone era transformed the attendee experience at events and, as a consequence, expanded what planners were expected to deliver. Mobile event apps -- pioneered by DoubleDutch (2011), Whova, Bizzabo, and EventMobi -- gave planners a digital channel to push real-time agenda updates, networking prompts, session polls, and exhibitor maps to every attendee's pocket. This was qualitatively new: for the first time, the planner had a live communication line to all attendees during the event itself, not just before it. The apps also generated data the planner had never had before: session attendance scan rates, engagement scores, networking meeting counts, and post-event NPS surveys that gave sponsors and exhibitors actual ROI metrics. Planners who mastered this layer became significantly more valuable to their clients.

  • Virtual and hybrid event platforms (Zoom Events, Hopin, ON24) -- COVID era

    In March 2020, the entire global events industry was suspended by the COVID-19 pandemic. Within weeks, planners who had never produced a virtual event were deploying Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Hopin, and ON24 to deliver online versions of conferences, trade shows, and product launches. The pivot was rapid and forced: most planners reported becoming significantly more proficient in technology as a result of the pandemic. Virtual events introduced a new production layer -- streaming, virtual networking lounges, on-demand session libraries, global attendee time-zone management -- that planners had to learn under live-fire conditions. The hard lesson from 2020-2022 was that virtual events could not replicate the relationship-building, deal-making, and experiential density of in-person gatherings. Attendance rates fell sharply for all-virtual events after the novelty wore off. The lasting outcome was the hybrid event format: in-person + simultaneous remote stream, requiring planners to manage both channels simultaneously.

    Effect on the work

    The virtual pivot compressed the event planning workforce in 2020 -- the deepest single-year employment collapse the BLS OEWS era had recorded for this occupation. Many planners left the industry permanently during the 2020-2021 disruption; the workforce that recovered by 2023 was smaller in absolute terms than the pre-pandemic size until 2024 surpassed it.

  • AI event intelligence platforms (CventIQ 2025, Reposite PlanPilot, Bizzabo BizzyAI)

    The AI layer arrived across the event-management stack in 2023-2025. Cvent launched CventIQ in June 2025, adding natural-language venue search, an AI writing assistant for event marketing content, feedback summarization, and an attendee-facing AI concierge to its platform. Reposite's PlanPilot -- acquired by Cvent in 2025 -- uses AI to auto-generate RFPs and accelerate supplier response. Bizzabo's BizzyAI handles attendee personalization and meeting scheduling. Tripleseat Intelligence applies demand forecasting to F&B logistics. The PCMA 2024 study found planners using AI for content creation save several hours per event cycle; the Amex GBT 2026 Forecast found 50% of planners already integrating AI into delivery. The transformation is significant but concentrated in the operational-administrative layer: sourcing, registration, content drafting, and analytics. The negotiation, client relationship, creative experience design, and on-site execution layers -- which Amex GBT's 2026 respondents identified as the top priority for their events -- remain highly human-dependent.

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Meeting, Convention, and Event Planners employment and pay by year

On record since1928
Latest US employment142,860 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$61,160 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+5.8% 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 12103)

    Employment, 2020
    21,060, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 12103 Conference and event planners, 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$59,600, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 12103 Conference and event planners, 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 27 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
195615,000n/aEst., PCMA Researched contextReport
197230,000n/aEst., Meeting Professionals International Researched contextReport
199055,000$28,000Est., Events Industry Council (employment) Researched contextEst., BLS (pay) Researched contextReport
200129,560$36,550BLS OEWS 2001 Official statisticReport
200332,980$39,060BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
200434,640$39,620BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
200540,040$41,280BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
200642,510$42,180BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
200745,490$43,530BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
200847,960$44,260BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
200951,530$44,780BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
201056,950$45,260BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
201164,020$46,020BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
201270,480$45,810BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
201373,290$46,260BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
201477,940$46,490BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
201587,400$46,840BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
201695,850$47,350BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017102,420$48,290BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018110,120$49,370BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019117,610$50,600BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020109,800$51,560BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
202198,150$49,470BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022112,070$52,560BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023122,130$56,920BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024134,670$59,440BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025142,860$61,160BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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