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Procurement clerks

Name: Procurement Clerks: employment and wages since 1940
Creator: Future History
License: https://futurehistory.earth/terms

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 55,810 US procurement clerks, with median pay of $50,580 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 79,610, in May 2008. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 75,000 from 1940, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for procurement clerks: Internet e-procurement platforms, 1996 to 2015.

Official statistic: latest count and pay, highest count.Researched context: earliest figure.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to decline 8.1% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

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.

Cite this page

APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Procurement clerks: jobs and pay since 1940 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-3061

Chicago

Future History. "Procurement clerks: jobs and pay since 1940." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-3061.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_43_3061, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Procurement clerks: jobs and pay since 1940}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-3061}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

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1925195019752000now

2026

Known then as Purchasing Clerk / Order Clerk (industrial purchasing era)

Known then as Purchasing Clerk / Buying Clerk / Order Clerk (postwar expansion era)

Known then as Purchasing Clerk / Materials Clerk (MRP and ERP transition era)

Known then as Purchasing Clerk / Procurement Support Specialist (e-procurement era)

Known then as Procurement Clerks (BLS SOC 43-3061)

Known today as Procurement Clerks (BLS SOC 43-3061)

Projected to still be called Procurement Clerks (BLS SOC 43-3061)

Data from the May 2025 survey

US Employment

56K

Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic

Report an error

Median Annual Wage

$50,580

Est.

≈ $49,283 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic

Report an error

Beat · 1915

March 1915: The National Association of Purchasing Agents (NAPA) is chartered in New York, the first national body to recognize purchasing as a professional discipline. Founded with 22 national directors after local purchasing associations had formed in at least 10 US cities (Buffalo's chapter dates to 1904). The professional association formally demarcated the buyer's role from the clerical support layer below it, the founding context of the procurement clerk as a distinct occupation. NAPA published its Principles and Standards of Purchasing Practice in 1923, one of the first formal ethical codes in American business.

Beat · 1941

US entry into World War II in December 1941 triggers the largest government procurement operation in history. The War Production Board, Office of Price Administration, and military service procurement commands hire thousands of purchasing support workers to manage contracts for aircraft, vehicles, ammunition, and raw materials. The War Industries Board model from WWI is expanded dramatically: by 1944 federal procurement spending exceeds $50 billion annually, and every dollar requires a paper trail of requisitions, purchase orders, vendor records, and receiving reports maintained by clerical staff. The wartime procurement apparatus institutionalizes the three-way match (purchase order, receiving report, vendor invoice) as the standard internal control that procurement clerks would enforce for the next 80 years.

Beat · 1968

The Transportation Data Coordinating Committee (TDCC) is formed in the US, beginning the standardization work that will produce the first electronic purchase order formats. EDI standardization allows companies to transmit orders and invoices as structured electronic records rather than paper documents. The early EDI ecosystem requires purchasing clerks to learn terminal-based data entry rather than typewriting, shifting the core technical skill of the role for the first time since the introduction of the typewriter.

Beat · 1974

NAPA renames itself the National Association of Purchasing Management (NAPM) in 1968 and introduces the Certified Purchasing Manager (C.P.M.) credential in 1974, described as the first major professional certification in the purchasing field. The credential demarcated the professional buyer from clerical support workers more formally, reinforcing the two-tier structure of the occupation group: professional buyers with credentials, and procurement clerks who handled the transactional support work.

Beat · 1992

SAP R/3 launches in 1992 as a client-server enterprise platform with a graphical interface, making the Materials Management (MM) module accessible to a much wider user base than the previous mainframe R/2 system. Within a decade SAP R/3 and competing ERP platforms (Oracle, PeopleSoft, Baan) are the standard operating environment for procurement in large and mid-size organizations. The ERP transition redefines the procurement clerk's job: instead of typing purchase orders from scratch, the clerk reviews and releases system-generated orders, handles exceptions flagged by the system, and maintains vendor master records. The net effect on headcount is substantial: one study of ERP implementations in the 1990s found procurement processing costs fell 70 percent or more after implementation.

Beat · 1999

Ariba goes public in June 1999 at $23 per share, closing day one at $90, reflecting dot-com era expectations for e-procurement automation. Ariba's network introduced the "PO-Flip," a transaction type that converts a buyer's purchase order into a supplier's invoice automatically using agreed business rules, eliminating a manual re-keying step on the supplier side and a three-way match step on the buyer side. Within a year of its IPO, Ariba's platform is transmitting billions of dollars in purchasing volume. Commerce One, a rival e-procurement firm, attracts similar investment. The April 2, 1999 first Ariba Network transaction was a $47.50 purchase order for network cables: order number 000000001.

Beat · 2001

NAPM votes in May 2001 to rename itself the Institute for Supply Management (ISM), reflecting the shift from "purchasing" to "supply management" as the framing for the professional discipline. The same decade sees procurement departments increasingly staffed with supply-chain analysts, contract specialists, and strategic sourcing managers rather than the procurement clerks who had anchored the function through the mid-20th century. ISM membership, while still large, reflects a professional community increasingly defined by analytics and strategy rather than transaction processing.

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 · 1915

In March 1915, a group of purchasing officials from New York City chartered the National Association of Purchasing Agents (NAPA), the first national body to recognize buying as a professional discipline distinct from general management or accounting. The founding was not accidental: it reflected a generation of industrial growth in which the volume and complexity of purchased materials had outrun what a company officer could handle in passing. Before the 1880s, purchasing was simply something that a factory superintendent, a bookkeeper, or a proprietor did alongside everything else. By the 1900s, the scale of American manufacturing demanded something different. Andrew Carnegie's steel plants and Henry Ford's River Rouge complex consumed thousands of tons of raw material per week, and the paperwork of tracking those orders, confirming deliveries, and matching invoices to purchase records required dedicated hands. The purchasing clerk emerged in these large industrial settings as the person who translated a buyer's verbal or written requisition into a formal typed purchase order, logged it into a ledger, tracked its expected delivery date, and filed the confirming invoice when the goods arrived. The Smithsonian Institution's records of early 20th-century office life describe exactly this division of labor: professional buyers negotiated terms and selected vendors, while a supporting clerical staff of purchasing clerks produced the documents, maintained the files, and kept the order log current. World War I accelerated the role's spread: the War Industries Board and the Navy Department's procurement offices hired hundreds of purchasing support workers to manage the extraordinary volume of military contracting. NAPA membership reached 15,000 by the early 1950s as purchasing became a recognized management function in American industry, and the clerical support workforce underneath those purchasing managers grew in step. The occupation found its modern statutory form in the 2000 BLS Standard Occupational Classification, which separated procurement clerks (43-3061) from the buyers and purchasing agents (13-1020) above them in the chain, and from the broader office and administrative support group around them. What the 2000 SOC codified had been a working reality in American offices for most of the preceding century: the person who keeps the purchase order flowing.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace procurement clerks? 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
-8.1%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 43-3061 (Procurement clerks): 56.9 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 52.3 thousand in 2035, a change of -4.6 thousand (-8.1%). 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

Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for procurement clerks

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

AI is sitting alongside you here Track the status of requisitions, contracts, and orders

Sources^[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you here Approve and pay bills

Sources^[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you here Maintain knowledge of all organizational and governmental rules…

affecting purchases, and provide information about these rules to organization staff members and to vendors.^[2]

Where your edge is

Tools of the era

How has the work of procurement clerks changed since 1915?

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

Typewriter and carbon-copy purchase order (industrial paper era)
The procurement clerk's fundamental tool from the occupation's formal emergence through the mid-20th century was the typewriter and a multi-part carbon-copy form. A purchase order was a typed document produced in three to five copies: one for the vendor, one for the receiving dock, one for accounts payable, one for the purchasing file, and sometimes one for the requesting department. Producing and routing these copies required a clerk who could type accurately, understood the routing rules, and maintained the order log by hand in a ledger. The IBM Electric typewriter, introduced after IBM's 1933 acquisition of Electromatic Typewriters Inc. of Rochester, New York, substantially increased output speed compared to manual machines and became standard in purchasing departments of larger firms by the 1940s.
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and ANSI X12 standard (1979)
The first standardized electronic transmission of purchasing documents emerged from military logistics requirements. The Transportation Data Coordinating Committee (TDCC) was formed in 1968 to standardize electronic manifests across rail, ocean, air, and trucking carriers. Large automotive manufacturers, retailers, and the federal government began requiring EDI compliance from suppliers through the late 1970s and early 1980s. For procurement clerks, EDI shifted order transmission from mailing paper forms to transmitting structured data over dial-up VANs (Value Added Networks), but the underlying task of preparing and monitoring orders remained a human function. EDI reduced mailing time and transcription errors but required clerks to learn new terminal-based software and understand transmission protocols.
MRP and early ERP platforms (SAP R/2, Oracle, MFG/PRO)
Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) systems emerged in the late 1970s and became mainstream through the 1980s, followed by full enterprise resource planning platforms in the early 1990s. SAP R/2 (mainframe, early 1980s) and SAP R/3 (client-server, 1992) introduced database-driven materials management modules that could auto-generate draft purchase requisitions from inventory reorder points and convert approved requisitions into purchase orders with a single transaction. Oracle and PeopleSoft offered competing suites. For procurement clerks, this transition was the most consequential single technology shift: the routine of manually typing a purchase order from a paper requisition gave way to reviewing and releasing a system-generated order that had already been pre-populated with vendor, price, and delivery terms from the contract master file. The volume of orders per clerk increased substantially, and the skill requirement shifted from accurate typing and paper filing toward ERP transaction competence.
Effect on the work
ERP adoption in manufacturing and government through the 1980s and 1990s is the primary explanation for the fall in procurement clerk employment from roughly 195,000 (1980) to 75,960 (2000) even as US GDP and purchasing volumes grew. Each ERP-equipped buyer could handle substantially more orders with less clerical support.
Internet e-procurement platforms (Ariba 1996, Commerce One, SAP Ariba 2012)
Ariba, founded in September 1996 by Steve Krach and others after Krach's frustration with GM's procurement bureaucracy, launched the first mass-market web-based procurement platform. Ariba's network introduced the "PO-Flip," allowing suppliers to transform a purchase order into an invoice automatically using business rules, eliminating a significant manual step on both sides. The dot-com era also produced Commerce One and a generation of supplier catalogs and electronic marketplaces that allowed employees to self-serve on approved catalog items without involving a procurement clerk at all. Oracle acquired PeopleSoft in 2004 and expanded its eProcurement module; SAP acquired Ariba in 2012, consolidating the two dominant procurement platforms. Together these tools automated catalog-based buying, approval routing, and invoice matching, the three tasks that had constituted the majority of a procurement clerk's daily workload.
Effect on the work
The e-procurement wave of 1999 to 2015 is the primary driver of procurement clerk employment declining from 75,960 (2000) to 71,470 by 2015. Catalog-based purchasing and automated three-way match removed the most routine transaction-handling tasks while retaining demand for clerks who managed exceptions, non-catalog purchases, and supplier relationship records.
AI-assisted procurement automation (Coupa, Jaggaer, SAP AI, generative PO generation)
From approximately 2018 onward, leading procurement platforms began incorporating machine learning for spend classification, anomaly detection in invoices, supplier risk scoring, and autonomous purchase order generation. Jaggaer's AI-powered procurement workflows and Coupa's community intelligence features allowed approved purchases below contract thresholds to be generated, transmitted, and matched without any human step. Generative AI tools from 2023 onward extended these capabilities to non-structured spend: parsing email quotes, drafting RFQ language, and filling order fields from unstructured supplier communications. A 2025 KPMG analysis estimated that AI could automate a large share of current procurement tasks, with the procurement clerk role carrying among the highest automation exposure of all procurement functions.
Effect on the work
The AI automation wave is the primary headwind for the remaining tens of thousands of procurement clerks as of 2024. The BLS National Employment Matrix projects a decline through 2034 driven by automation. The residual demand centers on exception handling (orders that fall outside system rules), compliance verification (confirming that purchases meet regulatory or contract requirements), and supplier communication for non-routine needs.

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Procurement Clerks employment and pay by year

On record since1915

Latest US employment55,810 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Latest US median pay$50,580 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Outlook-8.1% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

View all 28 years of cited US data, each linked to its source

Procurement Clerks in the US: employment and pay by year, with sources
Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source	Report
1940	75,000	n/a	Est., IPUMS USA [1] Researched context	Report
1950	n/a	$2,600 (average)	Est., University of Missouri Libraries [6] Researched context	Report
1960	150,000	n/a	Est., Census Bureau [2] Researched context	Report
1980	195,000	$14,200 (average)	Decennial Census 1980 (employment)[3] Researched contextEst., BLS Monthly Labor Review (pay)[7] Researched context	Report
2000	75,960	$27,720	BLS OEWS 2000 [4] Official statistic	Report
2003	72,820	$30,140	BLS OEWS May 2003 [5] Official statistic	Report
2004	71,740	$30,890	BLS OEWS May 2004 [5] Official statistic	Report
2005	71,390	$32,210	BLS OEWS May 2005 [5] Official statistic	Report
2006	74,370	$33,100	BLS OEWS May 2006 [5] Official statistic	Report
2007	77,180	$34,120	BLS OEWS May 2007 [5] Official statistic	Report
2008	79,610	$34,780	BLS OEWS May 2008 [5] Official statistic	Report
2009	78,150	$36,110	BLS OEWS May 2009 [5] Official statistic	Report
2010	73,650	$36,790	BLS OEWS May 2010 [5] Official statistic	Report
2011	70,540	$37,640	BLS OEWS May 2011 [5] Official statistic	Report
2012	69,750	$38,220	BLS OEWS May 2012 [5] Official statistic	Report
2013	68,690	$38,780	BLS OEWS May 2013 [5] Official statistic	Report
2014	70,190	$39,930	BLS OEWS May 2014 [5] Official statistic	Report
2015	71,470	$40,600	BLS OEWS May 2015 [5] Official statistic	Report
2016	72,120	$41,410	BLS OEWS May 2016 [5] Official statistic	Report
2017	70,510	$41,910	BLS OEWS May 2017 [5] Official statistic	Report
2018	68,100	$42,670	BLS OEWS May 2018 [5] Official statistic	Report
2019	66,030	$43,310	BLS OEWS May 2019 [5] Official statistic	Report
2020	61,000	$44,740	BLS OEWS May 2020 [5] Official statistic	Report
2021	61,930	$45,150	BLS OEWS May 2021 [5] Official statistic	Report
2022	63,340	$45,240	BLS OEWS May 2022 [5] Official statistic	Report
2023	61,580	$46,670	BLS OEWS May 2023 [5] Official statistic	Report
2024	59,900	$48,510	BLS OEWS May 2024 [5] Official statistic	Report
2025	55,810	$50,580	BLS OEWS May 2025 [5] Official statistic	Report

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Typewriter and carbon-copy purchase order (industrial paper era) (1915 to 1960)

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and ANSI X12 standard (1979) (1968 to 1985)

MRP and early ERP platforms (SAP R/2, Oracle, MFG/PRO) (1982 to 1999)

Internet e-procurement platforms (Ariba 1996, Commerce One, SAP Ariba 2012) (1996 to 2015)

AI-assisted procurement automation (Coupa, Jaggaer, SAP AI, generative PO generation) (2018 to present)

Procurement Clerks employment and pay by year

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