Time Machine

Pay and benefits specialists

Name: Compensation, Benefits, and Job Analysis Specialists: employment and wages since 1950
Creator: Future History
License: https://futurehistory.earth/terms

Official title Compensation, Benefits, and Job Analysis Specialists (SOC 13-1141)

Also called Compensation specialist, Benefits specialist, Compensation and benefits analyst, Comp & benefits analyst, Total rewards specialist

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 112,380 US pay and benefits specialists, with median pay of $78,210 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2012, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 70,000 from 1950, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for pay and benefits specialists: SaaS compensation platforms and cloud HRIS, 2005 to 2020.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 6% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

47.4% 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. 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 11 October 2026.

Cite this page

APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Pay and benefits specialists: jobs and pay since 1950 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/13-1141

Chicago

Future History. "Pay and benefits specialists: jobs and pay since 1950." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/13-1141.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_13_1141, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Pay and benefits specialists: jobs and pay since 1950}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/13-1141}}, 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.

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1925195019752000now

2026

Known then as Classification Officer / Wage Board Examiner (federal civil service era)

Known then as Personnel Specialist / Wage and Salary Administrator (post-GS-scale era)

Known then as Compensation Analyst / Benefits Coordinator (ERISA and comparable-worth era)

Known then as Total Rewards Analyst / HR Compensation Specialist

Known then as Compensation, Benefits, and Job Analysis Specialists (BLS SOC 13-1141)

Known today as Compensation, Benefits, and Job Analysis Specialists (BLS SOC 13-1141)

Projected to still be called Compensation, Benefits, and Job Analysis Specialists (BLS SOC 13-1141)

Data from the May 2025 survey

US Employment

112K

Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic

Report an error

Median Annual Wage

$78,210

Est.

≈ $76,205 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic

Report an error

Beat · 1923

The Classification Act of 1923 created the first systematic job-grading framework for the US federal government, establishing the Personnel Classification Board and requiring every civilian position to be formally evaluated before hire. This was the founding statutory moment for the compensation and job analysis profession in America.

Beat · 1948

The American Society for Personnel Administration was founded in Cleveland by 28 practitioners, becoming the professional home for compensation, benefits, and job analysis specialists. The organization grew to 50,000+ members by the 1980s and became SHRM in 1989, now with nearly 340,000 members worldwide.

Beat · 1949

The Classification Act of 1949 replaced the 1923 framework with the General Schedule (GS), a 15-grade white-collar pay system still in use. The GS scale became the template for structured pay grades in large private employers as well, and the classification standards published by the Civil Service Commission (later OPM) served as the authoritative reference for private-sector job analysts through the 1960s.

Beat · 1963

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 required that equal wages be paid for jobs of equal skill, effort, and responsibility, making job analysis a legal compliance function rather than a management convenience for the first time. Employers now needed documented, defensible job evaluations to demonstrate that pay differences were based on job content, not gender.

Beat · 1974

ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act) was signed on Labor Day, September 2, 1974. It established fiduciary, disclosure, and reporting requirements for private pension and health plans, creating a permanent compliance function for benefits specialists. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) was also created by ERISA to insure defined-benefit pension promises, protecting workers from the Studebaker-type failures (1963) that had motivated the law.

Beat · 1985

Minnesota became the first US state to mandate pay equity for state employees, following the 1981 Hay Associates study that found a 20% gap between male and female state worker pay. The comparable-worth movement peaked in the mid-1980s before federal courts constrained its legal reach. The episode drove significant investment in formal job evaluation systems as employers sought documentation to preempt comparable-worth litigation.

Beat · 2010

The Affordable Care Act signed in March 2010 reshaped benefits administration by imposing new coverage mandates, employer reporting requirements (ACA Forms 1094/1095), and the employer-shared responsibility provisions that took effect in 2014-2015. Benefits specialists took on a significant new compliance workload that partially offset productivity gains from HRIS automation, sustaining employment levels through the 2010s.

Beat · 2023

The EU Pay Transparency rules (2023/970/EU), scheduled to take effect June 2026, require EU-based employers to report gender pay gaps by category, remediate gaps exceeding 5%, and provide pay ranges to job applicants on request. For multinational employers, this created a new wave of classification and pay-equity compliance work, and a strong demand signal for specialists fluent in both US OFCCP standards and European labor law.

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 · 1923

The occupation that became BLS 13-1141 was born not in a corporate HR department but in the United States federal government. By the early 1920s, World War I had swelled the civilian federal workforce from roughly 400,000 to nearly 700,000, and agency heads were setting pay rates with no common standard: two clerks performing identical duties in different bureaus might earn wildly different wages depending on which supervisor had done the hiring. Congress addressed this chaos with the Classification Act of 1923, the first law to group federal positions into grades and pay levels. The Act established a Personnel Classification Board and required that every civilian position be formally evaluated and allocated to a grade before anyone could be hired into it. The civil servants who did this work (reviewing job duties, comparing positions across agencies, writing classification standards) were the first practitioners of what we now call job analysis and compensation management. The private sector watched. As American corporations grew through the 1920s and 1930s, industrial-relations and personnel departments copied the government model. Edward N. Hay and Dale Purves codified the practice in the early 1950s with the Hay Guide Chart Profile method, giving private employers a systematic way to score the "know-how, problem solving, and accountability" content of any job and derive a defensible pay range from that score. The Hay method spread across Fortune 500 employers during the 1950s and 1960s and is still in use today through Korn Ferry. The American Society for Personnel Administration, founded in 1948 by 28 practitioners who gathered in a Cleveland hotel, created the professional network that eventually became SHRM. By the time Congress passed ERISA in 1974 (requiring fiduciary oversight of pension and benefits plans) and the Equal Pay Act in 1963 (requiring job-based pay comparisons), the role of wage and salary administrator had become indispensable in every large employer. BLS first tracked the occupation as a distinct category in the SOC 2000 revision under code 13-1141, but the work had been performed, under various names, for more than seventy years.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace pay and benefits specialists? 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

+6%

BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 13-1141 (Compensation, benefits, and job analysis specialists): 118.1 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 125.2 thousand in 2035, a change of +7.1 thousand (+6.0%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers. 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)

47.4%

of tasks

What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 13-1141.00 Compensation, Benefits, and Job Analysis Specialists. Shown: human-rated β = 0.474, 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) 0.316 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.632; GPT-4-rated β 0.474. 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 pay and benefits specialists

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

AI is sitting alongside you hereWrite and optimize job descriptions using Textio or Ongig to flag biased language, predict applicant pool diversity, and score JD quality in real time

Write and optimize job descriptions using Textio or Ongig to flag biased language, predict applicant pool diversity, and score JD quality in real time; review AI-generated first drafts against O*NET task data and internal grade-level criteria before publishing to the ATS.^{[9],[10],[11]}

Tools picking this up

Textio ↗Ongig ↗ChatGPT ↗

Where your edge is

Own the grade-level calibration and internal classification logic that AI tools cannot infer from a prompt: Textio flags bias and predicts diversity but cannot determine whether a role is exempt vs. non-exempt under FLSA, or whether the scope warrants a Band 4 vs. Band 5. Build classification expertise as the durable differentiator.

Get started with these tools

ChatGPT

OpenAITutorial· beginner

OpenAI Academy ↗

Free

AI is sitting alongside you hereBuild and calibrate salary pay bands using Payscale or Pequity: pull real-time market benchmark data for target percentile positioning (P50/P65/P75), configure geographic and industry cuts, and model the internal-equity implications of proposed band changes before presenting to the comp committee.

Build and calibrate salary pay bands using Payscale or Pequity: pull real-time market benchmark data for target percentile positioning (P50/P65/P75), configure geographic and industry cuts, and model the internal-equity implications of proposed band changes before presenting to the comp committee.^{[12],[13],[3]}

Tools picking this up

Payscale ↗Pequity ↗Microsoft Copilot for Finance (Microsoft 365) ↗

Where your edge is

AI benchmarking platforms surface the market data quickly, but the strategic decisions (which percentile to target, how to handle legacy pay exceptions, whether to compress or expand band widths) require business context and influence with finance leadership that no tool replicates. Develop strong financial modeling skills to translate pay-band proposals into headcount cost projections.

AI is sitting alongside you hereCoordinate open enrollment: configure eligibility and benefits election rules in the HRIS (Workday or ADP), validate carrier data feeds for medical, dental, and vision plan populations, resolve election exceptions, and communicate plan changes to employees, with AI chatbots handling tier-1 employee questions during the enrollment window.

Coordinate open enrollment: configure eligibility and benefits election rules in the HRIS (Workday or ADP), validate carrier data feeds for medical, dental, and vision plan populations, resolve election exceptions, and communicate plan changes to employees, with AI chatbots handling tier-1 employee questions during the enrollment window.^{[14],[15],[4]}

Tools picking this up

Workday Compensation & Benefits ↗ADP SmartCompliance ↗

Where your edge is

Benefits automation platforms handle the rules engine and data feeds, but plan design decisions, carrier negotiation context, and exception resolution require vendor relationship knowledge that AI cannot hold. Build expertise in benefits plan design and carrier management to move up-market from enrollment administration into strategic benefits consulting.

Where pay and benefits specialists go next

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

Human Resources Managers
US median pay
$149,280 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+5.5%
Human Resources Specialists
US median pay
$75,940 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+6.4%
Data Scientists
US median pay
$120,230 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+34.6%

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Human Resources Managers

HR Managers direct the total rewards and people-operations function rather than executing individual analyses: a natural progression as AI absorbs the benchmarking, JD-writing, and enrollment-administration workload. Compensation specialists already possess the regulatory, financial, and cross-functional stakeholder skills that the manager role requires; the delta is organizational influence, budget ownership, and team leadership. WorldatWork 2025 data shows firms are restructuring comp teams toward fewer, higher-leverage practitioners: specialists who master AI tools are well-positioned for this move.

What you'd add

· HR business partner skills: workforce planning, org design, and talent strategy
· Budget management and headcount cost modeling at the department level
· Executive stakeholder influence: presenting to CPO and CEO on total rewards philosophy
· Team leadership: managing a small team of specialists and coordinating with HRBP network
· HRIS platform administration: Workday or SAP SuccessFactors configuration and governance

What it takesSome new skills to pick up

Tools of the era

How has the work of pay and benefits specialists changed since 1923?

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

Manual position classification and ledger-based wage administration
The first practitioners of this craft worked entirely by hand: reviewing written position descriptions, applying published classification standards issued by the Personnel Classification Board, and consulting printed pay tables. Wage surveys were conducted by mailing questionnaires to employers and tallying returns by hand. Job evaluation at firms that adopted the point-factor method required analysts to score each position on paper worksheets against factors like skill, effort, and working conditions, then locate the resulting point total on a printed pay-grade table. The technology of the era was the filing cabinet, the typewriter, and the adding machine.
Effect on the work
Manual methods constrained the number of positions one analyst could evaluate per year. The federal civil service, with hundreds of thousands of positions, required a dedicated Classification Division staffed by dozens of examiners. Large private employers maintained standing wage-and-salary staffs to handle the ongoing evaluation of new and revised positions.
Hay Guide Chart Profile method and structured job evaluation systems
Edward N. Hay and Dale Purves developed the Hay Guide Chart Profile method in the early 1950s, providing a systematic point-factor framework that evaluated any job on three universal factors: know-how, problem solving, and accountability. Hay Associates (now Korn Ferry) spread the method globally, and by the 1960s it was the de facto standard for job evaluation in Fortune 500 companies and large government agencies. The method gave compensation analysts a common language and a defensible, auditable paper trail for every pay-grade decision. It did not eliminate the analyst's judgment; it structured and amplified it. Analysts using the Hay method could evaluate positions consistently across divisions and geographies in a way that pre-method, intuition-driven wage setting could not match.
Effect on the work
Adoption of structured job evaluation methods drove professionalization: employers began requiring dedicated compensation analysts rather than relying on generalist personnel staff. The American Society for Personnel Administration, founded in 1948, grew rapidly through the 1950s and 1960s as practitioners sought professional credentials and peer networks.
Equal Pay Act (1963), ERISA (1974), and comparable-worth litigation tooling
The Equal Pay Act of 1963 required employers to compare jobs on the basis of skill, effort, and responsibility, turning job analysis from an internal management convenience into a legal compliance requirement. ERISA (1974) added fiduciary and reporting obligations for pension and benefits plans that demanded dedicated compliance specialists. The comparable-worth movement of the late 1970s and 1980s further raised the stakes: lawsuits and state legislative mandates required employers to document, defend, and in some cases revise their entire pay structures. Compensation analysts moved from back-office administrators to organizational risk managers. Pay-equity analysis, which had been an occasional consulting project, became a recurring annual audit function at large employers.
Effect on the work
The legislative and litigation wave of 1963-1990 drove strong growth in the compensation and benefits specialist workforce. ASPA membership grew between the early 1950s and the late 1980s, with compensation and benefits as the most densely populated specialty tracks.
PC-based compensation modeling (Lotus 1-2-3, Excel) and early HR information systems
The personal computer transformed compensation analysis from a paper-and-pencil craft to a spreadsheet science. Excel allowed analysts to build merit-matrix models, run salary-survey incumbency analyses, and project the budget cost of a proposed band restructuring in hours rather than days. Early HRIS platforms (PeopleSoft, SAP HR, ADP) moved employee records and payroll data into queryable databases, giving analysts direct access to the pay population rather than waiting for payroll printouts. The shift compressed the annual merit cycle from a months-long paper exercise to a managed electronic workflow. The analyst's role shifted: less time on arithmetic, more time on interpretation and communication.
Effect on the work
PC-based modeling increased the analytical throughput of a single specialist significantly. Some employers reduced the size of their compensation teams in the 1990s as spreadsheet tools eliminated clerical-level data-processing work, while others used the productivity gain to expand the scope of analysis rather than reduce headcount.
SaaS compensation platforms (Payscale, Mercer, Radford) and cloud HRIS (Workday, SAP SuccessFactors)
The mid-2000s brought a wave of SaaS salary-survey and compensation-benchmarking platforms that replaced the printed Mercer and Radford survey binders that had sat on every specialist's shelf. Payscale (founded 2002), CompAnalyst, and cloud-based Mercer and Radford portals gave analysts real-time market data with geographic and industry cuts available on demand. Workday's cloud HRIS (launched 2012) and SAP SuccessFactors restructured the annual compensation cycle into a configurable digital workflow, with merit matrices, approval routing, and pay-equity dashboards built in. The combination shifted the specialist's time allocation: salary survey administration and merit-worksheet distribution became largely automated, freeing capacity for strategic modeling and compliance work. The Affordable Care Act (2010) simultaneously created a new benefits-compliance burden, sustaining demand for specialists even as some administrative tasks were automated away.
Effect on the work
Cloud platforms compressed the time-per-task for benchmarking and merit administration substantially, but regulatory complexity (ACA, state pay-equity laws, OFCCP audit requirements) grew in parallel, keeping total specialist demand roughly flat. The ACA's employer-mandate provisions and reporting requirements generated significant new work for benefits specialists from 2014 onward.
AI pay-equity analytics and LLM-assisted job description tools (Syndio, Trusaic, Textio, Pequity)
From 2020 onward, a new generation of purpose-built AI tools began automating the two most time-intensive recurring tasks in this role. Textio and Ongig (both introduced before 2020 but widely adopted from 2020 onward) reduced job-description drafting from a half-day craft to a review exercise. Syndio and Trusaic PayParity automated the pay-equity regression analysis that had previously required either a statistics-literate specialist or an outside consultant. Pequity's AI-powered band builder (launched 2021) let a single analyst model pay ranges from integrated market data in real time. The WorldatWork 2025 Compensation Programs and Practices Survey documented employers restructuring comp teams toward fewer, higher-leverage practitioners who use these tools rather than larger teams handling tasks manually.
Effect on the work
Early evidence suggests the automation of JD writing and benchmarking has compressed demand for junior compensation analyst roles, while senior and lead roles commanding pay-equity strategy and compliance expertise have held steady or grown. BLS projects net employment growth for 13-1141 through 2034, attributing it primarily to benefits complexity from the aging population, next-generation drug costs, and expanding pay-equity regulation.

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Compensation, Benefits, and Job Analysis Specialists employment and pay by year

On record since1923

Latest US employment112,380 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Latest US median pay$78,210 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Outlook+6% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

View all 22 years of cited US data, each linked to its source

Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source	Report
1950	70,000	n/a	Est., SHRM Researched context	Report
1956	n/a	$5,200	Est., University of Missouri Libraries Researched context	Report
1974	120,000	n/a	Est., DOL/EBSA Researched context	Report
1975	n/a	$13,500	Est., BLS Researched context	Report
1990	160,000	n/a	Est., Wikipedia / SHRM Researched context	Report
2000	84,040	$41,660	BLS OEWS 2000 Official statistic	Report
2010	102,830	$57,000	BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statistic	Report
2011	94,710	$57,960	BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic	Report
2012	85,620	$59,090	BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic	Report
2013	81,520	$59,820	BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic	Report
2014	80,970	$60,600	BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic	Report
2015	79,780	$60,850	BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic	Report
2016	79,190	$62,080	BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic	Report
2017	80,530	$62,680	BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic	Report
2018	83,550	$63,000	BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic	Report
2019	89,300	$64,560	BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic	Report
2020	87,870	$67,190	BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic	Report
2021	87,750	$64,120	BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic	Report
2022	93,550	$67,780	BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic	Report
2023	99,850	$74,530	BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic	Report
2024	102,370	$77,020	BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic	Report
2025	112,380	$78,210	BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic	Report

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Where pay and benefits specialists go next

Human Resources Managers

Manual position classification and ledger-based wage administrationManual position classification1923–1950

Hay Guide Chart Profile method and structured job evaluation systemsHay Guide Chart Profile method1950–1975

Equal Pay Act (1963), ERISA (1974), and comparable-worth litigation toolingEqual Pay Act1963–1990

PC-based compensation modeling (Lotus 1-2-3, Excel) and early HR information systemsPC-based compensation modeling1990–2005

SaaS compensation platforms (Payscale, Mercer, Radford) and cloud HRIS (Workday, SAP SuccessFactors)SaaS compensation platforms2005–2020

AI pay-equity analytics and LLM-assisted job description tools (Syndio, Trusaic, Textio, Pequity)AI pay-equity analytics2020–present

Compensation, Benefits, and Job Analysis Specialists employment and pay by year

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