Time Machine

Brokerage clerks

Name: Brokerage Clerks: employment and wages since 1968
Creator: Future History
License: https://futurehistory.earth/terms

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 35,940 US brokerage clerks, with median pay of $65,750 a year. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 150,000 from 1968, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for brokerage clerks: T+2 settlement, cloud-based portfolio systems, and algorithmic reconciliation, 2010 to 2024. Brokerage clerk employment fell between 2004 and 2024.

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

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to decline 7.6% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

Official statistic

AI exposure studies

80% 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.

Last updated 1 November 2026.

Cite this page

APA

Future History. (2026, November 1). Brokerage clerks: jobs and pay since 1968 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-4011

Chicago

Future History. "Brokerage clerks: jobs and pay since 1968." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified November 1, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-4011.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_43_4011, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Brokerage clerks: jobs and pay since 1968}, year = {2026}, month = nov, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-4011}}, note = {Last updated 2026-11-01. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

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180018251850187519001925195019752000now

2026

Known then as Counting-house clerk / securities runner (early exchange era)

Known then as Stock transfer clerk / cage worker / settlement clerk

Known then as Securities clerk / purchase-and-sale clerk / transfer clerk

Known then as Securities processing clerk / back office clerk

Known then as Brokerage Clerks (BLS SOC 43-4011)

Known today as Brokerage Clerks (BLS SOC 43-4011)

Projected to still be called Brokerage Clerks (BLS SOC 43-4011)

Data from the May 2025 survey

US Employment

36K

Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic

Report an error

Median Annual Wage

$65,750

≈ $64,064 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic

Report an error

Beat · 1792

May 17, 1792: Twenty-four brokers and merchants sign the Buttonwood Agreement beneath a tree at 68 Wall Street, establishing the terms for trading with one another and fixing the minimum commission rate at 0.25%. The agreement creates the organizational foundation that will grow into the New York Stock Exchange, and with it an immediate need for clerks to process trades, compute commissions, and maintain records. The counting-house clerk of the early republic is the direct ancestor of the modern brokerage clerk.

Beat · 1867

The stock ticker is introduced in 1867, initially by Edward Calahan and refined by Thomas Edison in 1869. The ticker allows real-time price information to flow from the NYSE floor to brokerage offices throughout Manhattan and eventually across the country, dramatically increasing the speed of order flow. For the back office clerk, the ticker is a mixed blessing: it accelerates the volume of trades that need processing without providing any corresponding help with the paperwork.

Beat · 1968

NYSE trading volume reaches nearly 15 million shares per day by April 1968, triple the 5 million of 1965. The back offices of broker-dealers cannot keep pace: stock certificates pile up on desks, filing cabinets, and floors. Failed deliveries multiply. Organized crime syndicates steal an estimated $100 to $400 million in looted securities during the chaos. Clerks work seven-day weeks. Firms hire emergency third shifts. The NYSE responds by closing on Wednesdays for the entire second half of 1968 to give clerks time to catch up. The episode is documented in financial history as the "Paperwork Crisis." By 1970, roughly one-sixth of NYSE member firms have merged, liquidated, or gone out of business.

Beat · 1973

The Depository Trust Company (DTC) is founded, replacing the physical delivery of stock certificates with a book-entry system. Under DTC, certificates are immobilized in a central vault and ownership transfers are made as electronic ledger entries. This is the most significant single change to the back office clerk's job in the occupation's history: the receive-and-deliver clerk, whose entire function was managing the physical movement of paper certificates between firms, sees the core purpose of that role disappear. The first DTC president is William T. Dentzer Jr. Within a decade, the physical securities runner who had defined Wall Street's street-level operations for a century is largely gone.

Beat · 1975

May 1, 1975: The SEC abolishes fixed brokerage commissions, ending the 183-year-old Buttonwood Agreement commission structure. "May Day" on Wall Street triggers intense competitive pressure on broker-dealers to reduce transaction costs. Discount brokers, led by Charles Schwab (founded 1971), rapidly expand. The direct pressure on back office costs intensifies: firms competing on commission rates have every incentive to reduce the headcount required to settle each trade. The drive for straight-through processing accelerates from this point.

Beat · 1993

October 6, 1993: The SEC adopts Rule 15c6-1 shortening the standard US securities settlement cycle from T+5 (five business days after trade date) to T+3, effective June 7, 1995. The rule is made possible by the widespread adoption of electronic order routing, facsimile-based confirmation, and centralized clearance through NSCC. For brokerage clerks, T+3 compresses the processing window that had provided a buffer for manual verification. The five-day window had been a structural accommodation to the speed of manual processing; T+3 requires end-to-end automation of standard transactions.

Beat · 1999

The DTCC (Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation) is established as a holding company combining the Depository Trust Company and the National Securities Clearing Corporation under one regulatory roof. DTCC becomes the central counterparty for virtually all US equity, debt, and listed derivatives trades. Its straight-through processing infrastructure gradually absorbs the trade matching, confirmation, and settlement tasks that large firms had previously staffed with back office clerks.

Beat · 2024

May 28, 2024: The US securities settlement cycle moves to T+1. Trades must now settle within one business day of execution. This is the most dramatic compression of the settlement window in three decades. The post-trade verification, reconciliation, and exception-management tasks that brokerage clerks had retained even through prior automation waves must now complete overnight. Industry observers note that T+1 effectively requires institutions to adopt real-time automated affirmation of trades, eliminating most remaining overnight manual processing steps. The occupation enters its steepest phase of contraction.

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 · 1792

On May 17, 1792, twenty-four brokers and merchants gathered beneath a buttonwood tree at 68 Wall Street and signed an agreement setting the terms for trading stocks and bonds with one another. The Buttonwood Agreement is the founding document of the New York Stock Exchange, and it created, almost immediately, a need for a new kind of worker: someone to handle the paperwork behind every trade. Early securities transactions required the physical delivery of engraved stock certificates from seller to buyer, a hand-written ledger entry recording the change of ownership, and the computation of transfer taxes and brokerage commissions. These tasks fell to "counting-house clerks," who occupied the back rooms of brokerage partnerships in the merchant counting houses that lined Lower Manhattan. As the market grew through the nineteenth century, the back office grew with it. The telephone arrived on Wall Street in the 1870s and accelerated order flow dramatically, adding pressure on the clerks to process more transactions with the same hand-written methods. By the early twentieth century, large brokerage firms employed dozens of specialized clerks: transfer clerks who handled certificate delivery, margin clerks who tracked customer collateral, dividend clerks who distributed earnings, and "cage" workers who managed the physical vault of securities held by the firm. The job was skilled, trusted, and essential. A brokerage firm's ability to function from day to day depended entirely on whether its back office could clear the prior day's trades before the next morning's opening bell.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace brokerage 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
-7.6%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 43-4011 (Brokerage clerks): 36.9 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 34.1 thousand in 2035, a change of -2.8 thousand (-7.6%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (1.3% 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)
80%
of tasks
What this measures
Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 43-4011.00 Brokerage Clerks. Shown: human-rated β = 0.8, 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) 0.733 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.867; GPT-4-rated β 0.767. 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 brokerage clerks

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

AI is sitting alongside you here Document security transactions, such as purchases, sales…

, conversions, redemptions, or payments, using computers, accounting ledgers, or certificate records.^[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you here File, type, or operate standard office machines

Sources^[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you here Perform clerical tasks, such as answering phones or distributing…

mail.^[2]

Where your edge is

Tools of the era

How has the work of brokerage clerks changed since 1792?

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

Ledger book, quill pen, and stock runner (manual era)
The founding era of organized securities trading ran entirely on handwritten ledgers, quill pens, and a class of workers called runners or "paper boys" who physically carried stock certificates, order slips, and cash between brokerage houses, banks, and the NYSE floor. Every trade required a paper certificate to move from seller to buyer by hand. The counting-house clerk recorded each transaction in a bound ledger, computed commissions and taxes by hand, and maintained the firm's stock position manually. Speed depended entirely on how fast a messenger could run.
Effect on the work
Each additional percentage point of trading volume growth required a proportional increase in clerks and runners. Labor was the only scalable resource; the occupation grew in direct proportion to market volume.
Stock ticker, telephone, and paper certificate system (volume-scaled manual era)
The Edison stock ticker (1867, refined through the 1870s) allowed market prices to be transmitted electrically across the country, driving order volumes far beyond what prior messenger systems could handle. The telephone arrived on the NYSE floor in the 1870s, further accelerating order flow. The back office response was to scale up the clerk workforce: large firms employed dozens of specialized clerks (transfer, margin, dividend, purchase-and-sale, receive-and-deliver) each handling a distinct workflow node. Physical stock certificates, engraved on heavy paper, still had to travel between firms by messenger for each settlement. By the 1920s, the streets around Wall Street were clogged with messenger boys carrying certificates up and down the financial district.
Effect on the work
Stock market volumes roughly tripled between 1929 and 1968 (from about 1 billion shares per year in 1929-1950 to 3 billion by 1968). Back office staffing scaled with volume. By 1968, the paperwork load had outrun even a massively expanded clerk workforce.
DTC book-entry system and mainframe settlement (first automation era)
The 1968 paperwork crisis forced the industry to abandon the physical certificate delivery model. The NYSE established the Central Certificate Service (CCS) in 1968 as a stopgap, then the Depository Trust Company (DTC) was founded in 1973 to implement a comprehensive book-entry system: certificates would be immobilized in a central depository and ownership transfers made as electronic ledger entries rather than physical deliveries. Mainframe computers were introduced in large firms during the late 1960s and 1970s, though they were expensive and required specialist management few smaller firms could provide. The standard settlement cycle during this period was T+5 (five business days after trade date), reflecting the manual processing time still required even with early automation. The brokerage clerk role narrowed from general settlement worker to specialized positions in exception handling, customer account management, and regulatory record-keeping.
Effect on the work
The DTC and mainframe era reduced the peak crisis-level clerk headcount substantially. Firms that had hired emergency third shifts in 1967-1968 did not need to replace those workers as volume returned to normal post-1970.
T+3 settlement, electronic order entry, and STP (straight-through processing)
On October 6, 1993, the SEC adopted Rule 15c6-1 shortening the standard US securities settlement cycle from T+5 to T+3, effective June 7, 1995. The rule was made possible by widespread adoption of facsimile machines, electronic order routing, and centralized clearing through the NSCC (National Securities Clearing Corporation, founded 1976). Simultaneously, electronic order entry systems replaced the telephone-and-paper slip workflow on the sales side, feeding directly into automated clearing pipelines. The National Securities Clearing Corporation and Depository Trust Company merged under the DTCC holding company in 1999, creating a single clearing-and-settlement entity. Straight-through processing (STP) began automating the entire trade lifecycle from execution through settlement without manual intervention for standard transactions. Brokerage clerks became concentrated in the exceptions: failed trades, corporate actions, option exercises, and customer account disputes that STP could not handle.
Effect on the work
Brokerage clerical work contracted in the early 2000s. The post-dot-com bust (2001-2003) accelerated layoffs as brokerage volumes fell and firms cut back office costs aggressively. By 2024 the role had halved again from its mid-2000s level.
T+2 settlement, cloud-based portfolio systems, and algorithmic reconciliation
The SEC moved the standard settlement cycle from T+3 to T+2 in 2017, effective September 5. The change was enabled by continuous improvements in real-time trade matching, automated reconciliation, and industry-wide straight-through processing. Cloud-based portfolio accounting systems (BlackRock Aladdin, SimCorp, Broadridge) further automated the record-keeping, pricing, and corporate-action workflows that had been manual brokerage clerk tasks. Machine learning models began flagging reconciliation breaks and failed-trade exceptions automatically, replacing much of the pattern-recognition work that experienced back office clerks had previously done. The brokerage clerk role by the early 2020s was predominantly exception management, regulatory reporting, and client-facing account inquiries for complex situations.
Effect on the work
Brokerage clerk employment fell between 2004 and 2024. The remaining workforce is concentrated in large custodians, prime brokers, and full-service broker-dealers where the complexity of institutional client accounts and regulatory reporting still requires human expertise.
T+1 settlement, AI-assisted reconciliation, and real-time processing
Effective May 28, 2024, the SEC moved US securities settlement to T+1, compressing the window for post-trade processing to a single business day. T+1 eliminates most of the overnight manual verification workflows that brokerage clerks had retained even as earlier automation waves compressed their numbers. AI-assisted reconciliation tools can now flag, categorize, and often auto-resolve the breaks and exceptions that previously required a clerk's judgment. The remaining brokerage clerk tasks are primarily complex exception handling (cross-border trades, corporate actions on illiquid securities, estate account transfers) and regulatory reporting that requires a licensed, accountable human in the workflow.
Effect on the work
BLS projects a further employment decline for SOC 43-4011 from 2024 to 2034 (40,800 to 36,900 positions), representing the acceleration of a multi-decade contraction. The pace of AI adoption in reconciliation and exception-management platforms could steepen this decline beyond the BLS central estimate.

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Brokerage Clerks employment and pay by year

On record since1792

Latest US employment35,940 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Latest US median pay$65,750 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Outlook-7.6% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

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

Brokerage Clerks in the US: employment and pay by year, with sources
Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source	Report
1968	150,000	n/a	Est., Securities and Exchange Commission…[1] Researched context	Report
2003	75,380	$34,090	BLS OEWS May 2003 [2] Official statistic	Report
2004	73,910	$35,240	BLS OEWS May 2004 [2] Official statistic	Report
2005	70,110	$35,450	BLS OEWS May 2005 [2] Official statistic	Report
2006	72,400	$36,390	BLS OEWS May 2006 [2] Official statistic	Report
2007	71,170	$37,360	BLS OEWS May 2007 [2] Official statistic	Report
2008	68,430	$38,710	BLS OEWS May 2008 [2] Official statistic	Report
2009	62,470	$40,180	BLS OEWS May 2009 [2] Official statistic	Report
2010	57,600	$40,160	BLS OEWS May 2010 [2] Official statistic	Report
2011	60,720	$41,760	BLS OEWS May 2011 [2] Official statistic	Report
2012	61,870	$42,440	BLS OEWS May 2012 [2] Official statistic	Report
2013	60,300	$45,450	BLS OEWS May 2013 [2] Official statistic	Report
2014	57,240	$47,520	BLS OEWS May 2014 [2] Official statistic	Report
2015	57,490	$48,180	BLS OEWS May 2015 [2] Official statistic	Report
2016	59,820	$49,200	BLS OEWS May 2016 [2] Official statistic	Report
2017	58,930	$49,800	BLS OEWS May 2017 [2] Official statistic	Report
2018	55,100	$51,400	BLS OEWS May 2018 [2] Official statistic	Report
2019	47,990	$52,750	BLS OEWS May 2019 [2] Official statistic	Report
2020	44,720	$55,270	BLS OEWS May 2020 [2] Official statistic	Report
2021	39,980	$54,000	BLS OEWS May 2021 [2] Official statistic	Report
2022	42,700	$54,680	BLS OEWS May 2022 [2] Official statistic	Report
2023	48,060	$60,150	BLS OEWS May 2023 [2] Official statistic	Report
2024	40,090	$62,940	BLS OEWS May 2024 [2] Official statistic	Report
2025	35,940	$65,750	BLS OEWS May 2025 [2] Official statistic	Report

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Ledger book, quill pen, and stock runner (manual era) (1792 to 1867)

Stock ticker, telephone, and paper certificate system (volume-scaled manual era) (1867 to 1968)

DTC book-entry system and mainframe settlement (first automation era) (1968 to 1993)

T+3 settlement, electronic order entry, and STP (straight-through processing) (1993 to 2010)

T+2 settlement, cloud-based portfolio systems, and algorithmic reconciliation (2010 to 2024)

T+1 settlement, AI-assisted reconciliation, and real-time processing (2024 to present)

Brokerage Clerks employment and pay by year

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