Time Machine

Concierges

Name: Concierges: employment and wages since 2000
Creator: Future History
License: https://futurehistory.earth/terms

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 49,240 US concierges, with median pay of $38,950 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the May 2025 count is the highest. BLS counts here go back to May 2003, when there were 16,710 jobs. The last full technology era for concierges: Digital guest messaging platforms and senior-living technology, 2015 to 2023. Senior-living and healthcare concierge employment grew substantially through this period, partially offsetting declines in hotel-based positions.

Official statistic

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 2.6% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

Official statistic

AI exposure studies

70% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023 Official statistic

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.

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APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Concierges: jobs and pay since 2000 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/39-6012

Chicago

Future History. "Concierges: jobs and pay since 2000." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/39-6012.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_39_6012, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Concierges: jobs and pay since 2000}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/39-6012}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

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US Employment

49K

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic

Report an error

Median Annual Wage

$38,950

≈ $37,951 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic

Report an error

Beat · 1700

The concierge role in its recognizable form is established in the royal palaces of France, particularly Versailles. The title derives from the Latin conservus (fellow servant) and refers to the keeper of keys and candles who manages visitor access, room assignments, and logistics beneath the notice of the monarch. The Paris Conciergerie, a royal palace later used as a prison (where Marie Antoinette was held before her execution in 1793), takes its name from this role.

Beat · 1850

The grand hotel boom of mid-nineteenth-century Europe, centered on Paris, London, and Vienna, transforms the concierge from a palace functionary into a hospitality professional. The hotels of this era, including the Grand Hotel du Louvre (Paris, 1855) and the Savoy (London, 1889), employ a portier whose job is multilingual guest management: securing theatre tickets, recommending restaurants, arranging carriages, and navigating the city on behalf of wealthy travelers who are unfamiliar with it. Swiss nationals are disproportionately represented in the profession across European countries.

Beat · 1929

On October 26, 1929, Pierre Quentin, the concierge at the Hotel Ambassador in Paris, invites twenty colleagues to dinner at Restaurant Noel Peters. Eleven attend. Within four weeks the new association is ratified at the first General Assembly, with over 75 delegates present. Pierre Quentin becomes the first president of what will become Les Clefs d'Or. The organization establishes the crossed golden-key lapel pin as its emblem, a symbol of access and professional trust. The dinner takes place on the same week as the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

Beat · 1952

On April 25, 1952, at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, delegates from France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Switzerland convene the first international concierge congress and establish the Union Europeenne des Portiers des Grands Hotels. Ferdinand Gillet, who had traveled across Europe over several years specifically to recruit national sections, becomes a founding leader. The organization will later take the name Les Clefs d'Or and eventually grow to 4,000 members across 80 countries and six continents.

Beat · 1974

Tom Wolfe, who trained at the Ritz London and the Hotel Lancaster, opens the first concierge desk in the United States at the Fairmont San Francisco. He places a card in each guest room explaining what the word "concierge" means, since most Americans have never encountered the concept. Wolfe later describes the early period as requiring patient education: guests who needed something simply asked the front desk or did without; the idea that a specialist in local access and arrangements sat in the lobby was unfamiliar. Wolfe serves as the Fairmont's chief concierge for decades.

Beat · 1978

The United States joins Les Clefs d'Or as a member section in 1978, four years after Tom Wolfe established the first US concierge desk at the Fairmont. Holly Stiel of San Francisco becomes the first female member of Les Clefs d'Or in its history. The founding of the US section marks the moment the concierge function begins its slow spread from a handful of top-tier luxury hotels to broader adoption across the American hospitality industry.

Beat · 2000

The 2000 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) revision introduces a dedicated code for concierges (39-6012) within the new Personal Care and Service major group (39-xxxx), separating the occupation from baggage porters and bellhops (39-6011) for the first time in BLS data collection. This administrative separation reflects the practical reality that the concierge had become a distinct professional role in American hotels, with its own career trajectory, salary level, and professional association (Les Clefs d'Or USA).

Beat · 2020

COVID-19 delivers the worst single-year employment shock in the history of American hospitality. Approximately 70 percent of US hotel staff are furloughed or laid off during the pandemic's first wave. Leisure and hospitality as a sector loses close to 8 million jobs. Hotel concierge desks across the country close as properties shut down or reduce to skeleton operations. When hotels reopen through 2021 and 2022, many initially operate without a dedicated concierge, relying on front-desk staff to absorb the function. The BLS OEWS data for 2020 shows a substantial decline in concierge employment; the recovery through 2021-2024 is strong but the composition shifts further toward healthcare and residential settings, which proved more stable through the pandemic period.

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, ONS ASHE figures (UK pay and jobs) 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 · 1700

The word "concierge" most likely descends from the Latin conservus, meaning fellow servant, filtered through Old French into a title given to the keeper of candles and keys in medieval royal palaces. By the time Louis XIV was holding court at Versailles in the late seventeenth century, the post had stabilized into something recognizable: a senior household official who managed access to rooms, tracked visiting dignitaries, and kept the palace running beneath the notice of royalty. When European castle life faded and grand urban hotels rose to take their place in the nineteenth century, the function migrated with it. The Swiss, who had long filled these positions in Parisian apartment buildings (where they were nicknamed "Suisses" for their national origin), proved especially skilled at the work. By the 1850s, the first-class hotels of Paris, London, and Vienna employed a portier des grands hotels whose job was to know everything: which carriage would run tonight, where to find a doctor at 2 a.m., how to secure a table at the Cafe Anglais without a reservation, and how to do all of it with perfect discretion. The role formalized in 1929 when Pierre Quentin, the concierge at the Hotel Ambassador in Paris, invited twenty colleagues to dinner and within four weeks had ratified a professional association: Les Clefs d'Or, the Golden Keys, named for the crossed golden-key lapel pins that members wore as a signal of their status. The profession arrived in the United States in 1974, when Tom Wolfe, who had trained at the Ritz London and the Hotel Lancaster, set up the first concierge desk in North America at the Fairmont San Francisco and placed a card in every guest room explaining what the strange word on the door meant. He stayed for decades. His successors are now scattered across senior living communities, corporate towers, and hospital lobbies, managing the details of other people's lives with the same mix of local knowledge, discretion, and resourcefulness that the Versailles portier first learned to provide.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace concierges? 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
Target year 2035
+2.6%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 39-6012 (Concierges): 50.2 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 51.5 thousand in 2035, a change of +1.3 thousand (+2.6%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (1.7% 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)
70%
of tasks
What this measures
Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 39-6012.00 Concierges. Shown: human-rated β = 0.7, 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) 0.667 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.733; GPT-4-rated β 0.467. 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 concierges

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

AI is sitting alongside you here Provide information about local features, such as shopping…

, dining, nightlife, or recreational destinations.^[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you here Make reservations for patrons, such as for dinner…

, spa treatments, or golf tee times, and obtain tickets to special events.^[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you here Provide directions to guests

Sources^[2]

Where your edge is

Tools of the era

How has the work of concierges changed since 1700?

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

Physical keys, ledger books, and personal local knowledge
The concierge of the grand hotel era operated entirely through embodied knowledge and personal networks. A Paris hotel portier in 1880 carried the physical keys to every guest room on a master ring, kept handwritten registers of arrivals and requests, and relied on a web of personal contacts built over years, theatre box office acquaintances, carriage drivers, and restaurateurs who owed him favors. No technology intermediated this work: the value was entirely in the human network the concierge had cultivated. The golden key lapel pin, adopted by Les Clefs d'Or in 1929, was a signal that the wearer possessed exactly this kind of dense, trusted, local access.
Telephone switchboard and professional association (Les Clefs d'Or)
The telephone transformed what a concierge could do in real time: a phone on the concierge desk connected the professional directly to restaurants, theatres, airlines, and car services without sending a physical runner. Les Clefs d'Or, founded in Paris in 1929 and expanded internationally at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes in 1952, simultaneously transformed the concierge from a skilled individual into a member of a professional network. A Les Clefs d'Or member in London could call a counterpart in Geneva and arrange a seamless multi-city itinerary for a guest in a way that was simply impossible for an unaffiliated hotel clerk. The association created a language of professional obligation: if a colleague asked a favor, it was returned. This inter-city trust network was the concierge's highest-value asset, built on top of the telephone's reach.
Effect on the work
The telephone reduced the cost of guest-request fulfillment dramatically, allowing one skilled concierge to serve a larger number of guests simultaneously than the pre-phone era allowed. It did not reduce demand for the role; it increased what was possible from a single desk.
Hotel property management systems and airline GDS (SABRE/Apollo)
The global distribution systems (GDS) that airlines built in the 1960s (SABRE, American Airlines, 1960; Apollo, United, 1971) became accessible to hotel staff by the mid-1970s, enabling direct booking of flights and later hotel rooms from a desk terminal. For the concierge, the practical effect was profound: travel arrangements that previously required a separate travel agent relationship could now be handled from the concierge desk itself, extending the role into itinerary management. Hotel property management systems (PMS), adopted broadly in US full-service hotels through the 1980s, gave the concierge access to guest preference histories, loyalty program status, and room notes that allowed personalized service at scale. Four Seasons, in its 1980s US expansion across Philadelphia, Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Chicago, was the first hotel chain to introduce a company-wide European-style concierge at every property, setting the standard that other luxury brands followed.
Internet, mobile internet, and OpenTable / review platforms
The public internet and, from 2007, the smartphone gave guests direct access to the same reservation systems, city guides, and local reviews that concierges had previously monopolized. OpenTable launched in 1998 and allowed anyone to book a restaurant table without calling the concierge. Google Maps (2005) made the concierge's neighborhood geography available to every tourist. Yelp (2004) and TripAdvisor (2000) replaced the curated personal recommendation with crowd-sourced opinion. The concierge responded by shifting emphasis from information access to curation and relationship capital: what a skilled concierge could do that Google could not was call in a favor at a fully-booked restaurant, arrange a private after-hours access to a museum, or smooth a problem that a review site could only complain about after the fact. The era produced a sorting: commodity information delivery left the concierge role; high-judgment service and relationship-based execution stayed.
Effect on the work
The internet era accelerated the divergence between luxury hotel concierges (whose value grew more relational and less informational) and entry-level hotel service roles. Some smaller hotels that previously maintained a concierge desk shifted the function to front desk clerks as self-service information became ubiquitous.
Digital guest messaging platforms and senior-living technology (Alice, Concierge Plus)
A generation of hotel-specific SaaS platforms, including Alice (acquired by Actabl 2021), HotSOS (Amadeus), and Quore, brought concierge request management into structured digital workflows for the first time. A guest could text a request from their room; the concierge could log it, assign it, and close it in a ticketing system that generated service-level data. Simultaneously, the senior-living industry adopted dedicated concierge software (Concierge Plus, PointClickCare) to manage resident requests in assisted-living and CCRC facilities. These tools codified and expanded the concierge function across sectors that previously had no formal infrastructure for it, which is a key driver of the substantial growth in non-hotel concierge employment between 2000 and 2024. The COVID-19 pandemic (2020) briefly collapsed the accommodation-sector portion of the workforce before a strong recovery; meanwhile healthcare and residential concierges proved more stable through the lockdown period.
Effect on the work
Senior-living and healthcare concierge employment grew substantially through this period, partially offsetting declines in hotel-based positions. BLS data show the healthcare and social assistance sector moved to about 23.6% of total concierge employment by 2024, closely matching the accommodation sector share.
AI chatbots and large language model guest assistants (HiJiffy, Hoteza AI, ConciergeBot)
AI-powered chatbots that can handle guest inquiries in natural language, around the clock across multiple languages, entered mainstream hotel deployment from roughly 2023. A 2024 Hotel Tech Report found that more than 60 percent of hotels had adopted some form of AI automation, with chatbots as the most common entry point. For the human concierge, this represents a compression similar to the one the internet created for geographic information: commodity question-answering is leaving the role, and high-judgment, high-discretion work is remaining. The key open question as of 2026 is whether AI tools will also augment the concierge, giving them richer guest-preference histories, real-time local event feeds, and predictive request prompts, or whether they will simply cannibalize the entry-level tier of the role. The BLS 2024-34 projection of slight overall growth masks a significant sectoral split: hotel concierge positions are projected to decline, while healthcare and real estate concierge positions are projected to grow by roughly 10 percent.

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Concierges employment and pay by year

On record since1700

Latest US employment49,240 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Latest US median pay$38,950 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Outlook+2.6% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

View all 24 years of cited US data, each linked to its source

Concierges in the US: employment and pay by year, with sources
Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source	Report
2000	n/a	$21,320	BLS CPS 2000 [2] Researched context	Report
2003	16,710	$21,800	BLS OEWS May 2003 [1] Official statistic	Report
2004	17,310	$23,370	BLS OEWS May 2004 [1] Official statistic	Report
2005	16,810	$23,510	BLS OEWS May 2005 [1] Official statistic	Report
2006	19,150	$24,600	BLS OEWS May 2006 [1] Official statistic	Report
2007	19,770	$25,540	BLS OEWS May 2007 [1] Official statistic	Report
2008	20,380	$27,180	BLS OEWS May 2008 [1] Official statistic	Report
2009	20,470	$27,270	BLS OEWS May 2009 [1] Official statistic	Report
2010	19,650	$27,860	BLS OEWS May 2010 [1] Official statistic	Report
2011	22,650	$27,350	BLS OEWS May 2011 [1] Official statistic	Report
2012	25,880	$27,250	BLS OEWS May 2012 [1] Official statistic	Report
2013	30,190	$27,810	BLS OEWS May 2013 [1] Official statistic	Report
2014	31,050	$28,170	BLS OEWS May 2014 [1] Official statistic	Report
2015	31,430	$29,030	BLS OEWS May 2015 [1] Official statistic	Report
2016	32,020	$29,250	BLS OEWS May 2016 [1] Official statistic	Report
2017	35,750	$30,150	BLS OEWS May 2017 [1] Official statistic	Report
2018	37,490	$30,400	BLS OEWS May 2018 [1] Official statistic	Report
2019	41,670	$31,390	BLS OEWS May 2019 [1] Official statistic	Report
2020	36,800	$32,380	BLS OEWS May 2020 [1] Official statistic	Report
2021	33,560	$35,210	BLS OEWS May 2021 [1] Official statistic	Report
2022	37,600	$35,560	BLS OEWS May 2022 [1] Official statistic	Report
2023	41,020	$37,150	BLS OEWS May 2023 [1] Official statistic	Report
2024	44,200	$37,320	BLS OEWS May 2024 [1] Official statistic	Report
2025	49,240	$38,950	BLS OEWS May 2025 [1] Official statistic	Report

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Physical keys, ledger books, and personal local knowledge (1700 to 1929)

Telephone switchboard and professional association (Les Clefs d'Or) (1929 to 1975)

Hotel property management systems and airline GDS (SABRE/Apollo) (1975 to 1998)

Internet, mobile internet, and OpenTable / review platforms (1998 to 2015)

Digital guest messaging platforms and senior-living technology (Alice, Concierge Plus) (2015 to 2023)

AI chatbots and large language model guest assistants (HiJiffy, Hoteza AI, ConciergeBot) (2023 to present)

Concierges employment and pay by year

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