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Recreation workers

Also called Recreation coordinator, Recreation specialist, Parks and recreation worker, Community recreation worker, Camp counselor

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 331,490 US recreation workers, with median pay of $36,560 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 12,000 from 1923, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for recreation workers: Mobile communication and social media marketing for program promotion, 2015 to 2023.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 4.3% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

  • 25% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
  • 0.0061 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013

Since the 2013 prediction

In 2013, Frey and Osborne put this job's probability of computerisation at 0.0061. BLS counted 317,310 of these jobs in May 2013 and 331,490 in May 2025. The count moved sharply in one step, May 2020 to May 2021, when BLS changed how it estimates these counts, so no change is derived here.

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). Recreation workers: jobs and pay since 1923 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/39-9032

Chicago

Future History. "Recreation workers: jobs and pay since 1923." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/39-9032.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_39_9032, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Recreation workers: jobs and pay since 1923}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/39-9032}}, 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
19001925195019752000now
2026
Known then as Playground Superintendent / Playground Director (Boston Sand Garden era)
Known then as Recreation Director / Playground Leader (Playground Association of America era)
Known then as Recreation Leader / Recreation Worker (National Recreation Association era)
Known then as Recreation Worker / Activity Coordinator (NRPA formation era)
Known then as Recreation Workers (BLS SOC 39-9032)
Known today as Recreation Workers (BLS SOC 39-9032)
Projected to still be called Recreation Workers (BLS SOC 39-9032)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
331K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$36,560

≈ $35,623 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1885

The Boston Sand Gardens experiment, launched at the Children's Mission on Parmenter Street in the North End, is the first documented instance of paid, supervised recreational facilitation in the United States. Settlement workers hired young women to oversee children's play in sandboxes, establishing the foundational model: public space, supervised activity, hired facilitator. Within four years Boston had expanded to twenty-one such gardens. The pattern was quickly replicated in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia.

Beat · 1906

April 12, 1906: The Playground Association of America is formally organized at a meeting at the YMCA in Washington, D.C. Eighteen delegates from playground associations, public schools, settlements, and charity organizations attend. Theodore Roosevelt accepts the role of Honorary President; Jane Addams joins the founding board. Luther Halsey Gulick, who had helped James Naismith develop basketball in 1891, is elected President. The founding marks the moment when playground supervision becomes a profession with a national organization, a publication (The Playground magazine, launched 1907), and a training curriculum (the 1909 "Normal Course in Play").

Beat · 1935

May 6, 1935: President Franklin Roosevelt signs the executive order creating the Works Progress Administration, the largest public-employment program in US history. Recreation programs are among the funded activities from the first year. In New York City alone, 70,000 WPA relief workers build or renovate parks and facilities under the direction of 1,800 designers and engineers; the number of city playgrounds grows from 119 to 770 over the program's life. Recreation Specialists are hired to staff the completed facilities. The WPA transforms the scale of the municipal recreation workforce from a modest Progressive Era specialty into one of the most common jobs in American local government.

Beat · 1965

Five separate national organizations merge to form the National Recreation and Park Association: the American Institute of Park Executives, the National Recreation Association (successor to the original Playground Association of America), the American Recreation Society, the National Conference on State Parks, and the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums. The merger gives the profession a single national voice and a unified research and advocacy infrastructure. The NRPA would go on to establish the Certified Park and Recreation Professional (CPRP) credential and publish the foundational research on local parks department operations and staffing.

Beat · 1981

NCTRC (National Council for Therapeutic Recreation Certification) is founded as an independent credentialing agency, formalizing the CTRS designation. The therapeutic recreation sub-specialty had been growing since 1956, but NCTRC's establishment as an independent body, separate from both NRPA and the National Therapeutic Recreation Society, signals a profession now large enough to support its own credentialing infrastructure. By 1981 approximately 3,000 therapeutic recreation professionals hold credentials, up from just 260 in 1967.

Beat · 2020

COVID-19 park and facility closures in spring 2020 trigger the sharpest employment contraction the parks and recreation profession has ever experienced. Arts, entertainment, and recreation lost 1.3 million jobs nationally in March and April 2020. Local park and recreation agencies furloughed part-time and seasonal staff immediately; a parks and recreation employment analysis found 13.9% of state and local government parks jobs lost from 2020 to 2021. The Spokane Parks Department furloughed about 100 summer workers and held off hiring an additional 100 as a representative example. Recovery was uneven: agencies that had absorbed budget cuts during the recession were unable to keep up with rising labor costs, contributing to the 2022 labor shortage the NRPA documented in its annual agency surveys.

Beat · 2022

NRPA's Agency Performance Review data confirms that local park and recreation agencies in the United States collectively employ more than 160,000 full-time staff and hundreds of thousands of part-time and seasonal workers across more than 10,000 agencies. The 2022 NRPA labor shortage report documents that nearly every agency surveyed was struggling to fill vacancies. The most common shortage was in part-time and seasonal frontline program staff, the exact population of workers counted in BLS 39-9032. The combination of pandemic-era budget cuts and post-pandemic wage inflation made it difficult for municipal recreation departments, constrained by public-sector pay scales, to compete for the hourly workers they had always relied on.

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 recreation workers? 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
+4.3%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 39-9032 (Recreation workers): 346.9 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 361.9 thousand in 2035, a change of +15.0 thousand (+4.3%). 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)
25%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 39-9032.00 Recreation Workers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.25, 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) 0.095 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.405; GPT-4-rated β 0.238. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Frey & Osborne (2013), "The Future of Employment"
2013 study · Probability of computerisation (2013 model)
0.6%
probability
What this measures

Published appendix value for SOC 2010 39-9032 Recreation Workers: probability of computerisation 0.0061, rank 29 of 702 (rank 1 is least computerisable). Frey and Osborne estimated in 2013, with a Gaussian-process classifier on O*NET variables, how likely the whole occupation is to be technically automatable over "some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two". It is a probability for the occupation, not a share of tasks and not a forecast of jobs lost.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for recreation workers

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

AI is sitting alongside you hereDraft program guides, promotional flyers, social media posts, and newsletter copy to publicize activities and boost enrollment for seasonal program cycles.

Draft program guides, promotional flyers, social media posts, and newsletter copy to publicize activities and boost enrollment for seasonal program cycles.[7],[6]

Where your edge is

Use ChatGPT to generate first-draft descriptions from bullet points, then edit for the facility's voice and local specifics before publishing.

Get started with these tools
AI is sitting alongside you hereManage registrations, membership records, facility bookings, and participant waitlists using cloud-based recreation management platforms.

Manage registrations, membership records, facility bookings, and participant waitlists using cloud-based recreation management platforms.[8],[9]

Where your edge is

Master the AI-assisted demand forecasting and early-retention-risk alerts in platforms like Amilia to proactively fill programs and reduce cancellations.

AI is sitting alongside you hereDocument participant progress, attendance logs, incident reports, and program evaluation notes for regulatory compliance and internal quality review.

Document participant progress, attendance logs, incident reports, and program evaluation notes for regulatory compliance and internal quality review.[1],[7]

Where your edge is

Use AI-assisted templates to speed up routine documentation; retain ownership of clinical or incident-level notes where accuracy and liability are at stake.

Get started with these tools

Where recreation workers go next

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

What each move takes

Education and Childcare Administrators in preschool and daycare oversee program design and staff management, the same operational skills recreation coordinators build when managing community centers or camp programs. Leadership experience supervising recreation staff and budgets translates directly.

What you'd add
  • · Early childhood education fundamentals and licensing regulations
  • · Budget management and grant writing for community programs
  • · Supervisory skills: performance reviews, onboarding, staff development
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of recreation workers changed since 1885?

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

  • Sand Gardens and supervised playgrounds (hand-built, no equipment beyond basic apparatus)

    The first generation of recreation workers operated with essentially no technology beyond the built environment they inhabited: sandboxes, simple playground apparatus, fields, and the force of their own social authority. Program planning was done on paper. Attendance was tracked in handwritten ledgers. The job was entirely relational: showing up, organizing games, teaching activities, mediating disputes, and keeping children safe in spaces that had been carved out of the crowded city for exactly that purpose. The "tool" of this era was the trained facilitator herself, and the profession's founding documents describe at length how to read a room, manage group energy, and adapt activities on the fly.

  • WPA-built infrastructure (pools, community centers, athletic fields) as a national recreation platform

    The New Deal's Works Progress Administration did not give recreation workers a new tool so much as it gave the entire profession an entirely new physical platform. Between 1935 and 1943 the WPA built or renovated thousands of parks, swimming pools, community recreation centers, tennis courts, and athletic fields across the country. In New York City alone, the number of playgrounds grew. Recreation workers now had facilities built at scale for their work. The result was a dramatic expansion of the profession's reach: where a 1920 recreation director might supervise a single sandlot, a 1945 municipal recreation worker might be assigned to a fully equipped community center serving hundreds of residents daily. The WPA era permanently established municipal parks and recreation as a standard function of local government.

    Effect on the work

    WPA construction added tens of thousands of recreation worker positions to municipal payrolls. When WPA funding ended after World War II, many positions were absorbed into permanent municipal recreation departments, institutionalizing the profession's scale.

  • Therapeutic recreation credentialing (CAHR 1956, NTRS 1967, NCTRC 1981)

    In 1956, the Commission for the Advancement of Hospital Recreation established the first formal credentialing system for recreation workers in clinical settings, registering many hospital recreation personnel by 1959. The National Therapeutic Recreation Society formed in 1967 and absorbed the registration program, growing the credentialed population between 1967 and 1981. In 1981, NCTRC was founded as an independent credentialing body; the Certified Therapeutic Recreation Specialist (CTRS) credential formalized the clinical sub-specialty. For the broader recreation worker occupation, this era established a bifurcation between community recreation work (low formal credential requirements, municipal employment) and clinical therapeutic recreation (credential-backed, healthcare-aligned). This structural split persists in the modern SOC classification, where recreational therapists (29-1125) are entirely separate from recreation workers (39-9032).

  • NRPA formation and standardized recreation curriculum (1965 merger, CPRP credential)

    In 1965, the American Institute of Park Executives, the National Recreation Association, the American Recreation Society, the National Conference on State Parks, and the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums merged to form the National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA). This consolidation gave the profession a single national voice, a unified research publication (Parks and Recreation magazine), and eventually a voluntary national credential, the Certified Park and Recreation Professional (CPRP). For the frontline recreation worker, the NRPA era brought standardized training curricula, code-of-ethics frameworks, and a career ladder that was previously absent. Municipal recreation departments could now recruit from accredited university programs in recreation management, a field that grew rapidly at land-grant universities through the 1970s.

  • Registration management software and online program enrollment (ActiveNet, RecDesk, Vermont Systems)

    The shift from paper registration cards and telephone enrollment to web-based recreation management platforms transformed the administrative backbone of the recreation worker's job. Software platforms like Vermont Systems' RecTrac (founded 1988, web version 1990s), and later ActiveNet and RecDesk, allowed community members to browse and register for programs online without calling or visiting the facility. For the recreation worker, this meant that enrollment tracking, waitlist management, facility booking, and attendance reporting moved from manual ledgers to database platforms, reducing administrative burden on some tasks while adding new data-entry requirements on others. By 2010, most mid-size and large municipal parks departments operated on cloud-accessible recreation management systems.

  • Mobile communication and social media marketing for program promotion

    Recreation workers increasingly took on content-creation duties that had not existed in the role's prior form: writing social media posts, designing digital flyers in tools like Canva, managing Facebook event pages, and sending text-message and email blast announcements about program enrollment. NRPA surveys from this period showed recreation departments struggling to fill positions partly because applicants with strong digital communication skills were being recruited away by private-sector employers offering higher wages. The marketing layer of the recreation worker's job expanded significantly, while the hands-on facilitation layer remained unchanged.

  • AI program management assistants (Amilia AI/Cecilia, Traction Rec AI, ChatGPT for program copy)

    Beginning in 2023-2024, recreation management platforms began integrating AI assistants that could answer staff onboarding questions, forecast program demand, detect early membership retention risks, and auto-generate program descriptions from brief bullet-point prompts. Amilia's AI assistant "Cecilia" claimed an 85% success rate answering staff questions in real time. Traction Rec launched AI agents providing 24/7 member registration support for parks departments. ChatGPT and Canva AI began appearing in NRPA publications as productivity tools for writing promotional copy. The tasks most affected were administrative and promotional; the facilitation core of the role (leading activities, building belonging, responding to participant needs in real time) remained outside the AI's reach.

    Effect on the work

    No documented displacement of recreation worker headcount attributable to AI tools as of 2025. The primary effect is productivity augmentation on administrative tasks, not substitution of frontline facilitation roles.

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Recreation Workers employment and pay by year

On record since1885
Latest US employment331,490 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$36,560 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+4.3% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error
View all 27 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
192312,000n/aEst., Social Welfare History Project Researched contextReport
194075,000n/aEst., NYC Parks Department history Researched contextReport
195968n/aEst., NCTRC Researched contextReport
2000245,720n/aBLS OEWS 2000 Official statisticReport
2003265,640$18,600BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
2004266,520$19,320BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
2005264,840$20,110BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
2006273,280$20,470BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
2007278,070$21,220BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
2008282,680$21,960BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
2009286,230$22,280BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
2010293,430$22,260BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
2011301,840$22,130BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
2012309,730$22,240BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
2013317,310$22,390BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
2014321,110$22,620BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015336,150$23,320BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016336,880$23,870BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017352,350$24,540BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018353,570$25,060BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019358,750$26,350BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020325,640$28,440BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021264,020$29,680BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022270,380$31,680BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023281,750$34,410BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024309,640$35,380BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025331,490$36,560BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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