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Office clerks

Official title Office Clerks, General (SOC 43-9061)

Also called General office clerk, Office assistant, Administrative clerk, Clerical assistant, Data entry clerk

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 2,464,940 US office clerks, with median pay of $45,010 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the highest was 2,578,180, in May 2021, close to the May 2025 count. The earliest figure here is a Census (IPUMS) count of 63,000 from 1870, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for office clerks: Robotic Process Automation, 2017 to 2023.

What the sources say

Official outlook

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

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

  • 46% of work tasks in office and administrative support occupations, this job's group, are exposed to automation by AI. Not a forecast of job losses. Goldman Sachs, 2023
  • 50% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
  • 0.96 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 0.96. BLS counted 2,832,010 of these jobs in May 2013 and 2,464,940 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). Office clerks: jobs and pay since 1870 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-9061

Chicago

Future History. "Office clerks: jobs and pay since 1870." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-9061.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_43_9061, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Office clerks: jobs and pay since 1870}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-9061}}, 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
187519001925195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Scrivener / Copying Clerk
Known then as Office Clerk / Counting House Clerk
Known then as General Clerk / Office Worker
Known then as General Office Clerk (pre-SOC-2000)
Known then as Office Clerks, General (BLS SOC 43-9061)
Known today as Office Clerks, General (BLS SOC 43-9061)
Projected to still be called Office Clerks, General (BLS SOC 43-9061)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
2.46M
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$45,010

≈ $43,856 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1853

Herman Melville publishes "Bartleby, the Scrivener" in Putnam's Monthly Magazine (November and December issues). The story is the closest thing to a primary-source portrait of the general office clerk's psychological condition in the pre-typewriter era: a copying clerk in a Wall Street law office who refuses to copy.

Beat · 1874

E. Remington & Sons begins commercial sales of the Sholes & Glidden typewriter (contracts signed March 1873; commercial market launch July 1874). Within two decades, the role shifts from almost exclusively male to predominantly female, and the copying clerk begins his long disappearance as a masculine archetype.

Beat · 1887

Dorr Felt patents the Comptometer: the first commercially successful key-driven mechanical calculator. Comptometer operators, overwhelmingly women, become a standard fixture in large office accounting departments. The general clerical workforce splits further: some tasks get specialized, the residual grows.

Beat · 1959

October 5, 1959: IBM announces the 1401 data processing system to 50,000 prospective customers across 102 cities via closed-circuit television. November: Xerox introduces the 914 plain-paper copier. The same year delivers both the first mass-market business computer and the machine that eliminates paper-copying by hand. Two of the general clerk's core tasks begin their transition.

Beat · 2000

The 2000 SOC formally creates BLS code 43-9061, "Office Clerks, General": the residual category that now has an official home. Peak employment approaches 3 million in the years immediately following.

Beat · 2013

Frey & Osborne publish "The Future of Employment" and rank the general office clerk at ~0.96 probability of computerisation: one of the highest in the dataset of 702 US occupations. The paper is widely cited and widely dismissed. A decade later, the prediction looks conservative.

Beat · 2022

November 30, 2022: OpenAI releases ChatGPT, a general-purpose chatbot that can draft emails, summarize documents and answer routine questions: tasks that make up much of the general office clerk's daily work.

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 office 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
→ 2035
-6%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 43-9061 (Office clerks, general): 2,600.0 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 2,443.7 thousand in 2035, a change of -156.2 thousand (-6.0%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (0.7% 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.
Frey & Osborne (2013), "The Future of Employment"
2013 study · Probability of computerisation (2013 model)
96%
probability
What this measures

Published appendix value for SOC 2010 43-9061 Office Clerks, General: probability of computerisation 0.96, rank 629 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
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
50%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 43-9061.00 Office Clerks, General. Shown: human-rated β = 0.5, 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) 0.212 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.788; GPT-4-rated β 0.576. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Goldman Sachs (Briggs & Kodnani, 2023), "The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth"
2023 study · Share of work tasks exposed to automation by AI, all office and administrative support occupations (US)
46%
of tasks
What this measures

Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research scored the task content of each US occupation for exposure to automation by generative AI and weighted by OEWS employment. Exhibit 5 (US panel) reports 46% for office and administrative support occupations, the occupational group this role belongs to; the report publishes no figure for individual occupations. It measures how much of the group's work AI could automate, not how many jobs disappear, and it is a 2023 estimate, not a forecast for a later year.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for office clerks

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

AI is taking this onOversee AI-assisted document processing, reviewing Hyperscience or Rossum extraction results for forms, invoices, and office records that the system ingested

Oversee AI-assisted document processing, reviewing Hyperscience or Rossum extraction results for forms, invoices, and office records that the system ingested; correcting extraction errors (illegible handwriting, atypical form layouts); routing the 5-10% of documents the AI flagged as low-confidence to the appropriate team; managing physical filing for paper documents that have not yet been digitized.[7],[8],[2]

Where your edge is

Document filing and records copying are the clearest automation targets in this role: IDP platforms handle nearly all standard form extraction without human intervention. Shift your focus to exception-queue management (understanding why the AI flagged a document, correcting it with documented rationale) and to accelerating your organization's digitization of remaining paper workflows. Learning to configure basic document routing rules in your IDP platform is a differentiating skill.

AI is taking this onMonitor RPA bot runs for data entry workflows, reviewing exception queues in UiPath or Microsoft Power Automate where bots encountered data formats they could not parse (non-standard layouts, missing required fields, system timeouts)

Monitor RPA bot runs for data entry workflows, reviewing exception queues in UiPath or Microsoft Power Automate where bots encountered data formats they could not parse (non-standard layouts, missing required fields, system timeouts); manually entering or correcting the failed records; proofing AI-populated data fields for downstream accuracy before records are submitted to the ERP or database system.[9],[10],[1]

Where your edge is

Manual data entry from paper forms or spreadsheets to ERP systems is the highest-automation-exposure task in this role. RPA bots handle most structured-format entries faster and with fewer errors than human keyers. The retained skill is exception handling and bot oversight: understanding why a bot failed, what the correct value should be, and documenting the correction so the bot can be retrained. Basic Power Automate workflow literacy is a significant differentiator for staying employed in administrative support.

AI is taking this onManage calendars and schedule appointments using Microsoft 365 Copilot, accepting natural-language scheduling requests ("find a 30-minute slot for the three of us next week"), verifying that Copilot's proposed times align with unstated constraints (recurring conflicts Copilot doesn't know about, room capacity limits, executive preferences), and confirming complex multi-party bookings where the AI needs human override on priority decisions.

Manage calendars and schedule appointments using Microsoft 365 Copilot, accepting natural-language scheduling requests ("find a 30-minute slot for the three of us next week"), verifying that Copilot's proposed times align with unstated constraints (recurring conflicts Copilot doesn't know about, room capacity limits, executive preferences), and confirming complex multi-party bookings where the AI needs human override on priority decisions.[6],[2]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Copilot's April 2026 agentic calendar features handle routine scheduling without a human intermediary. Your remaining value is the contextual layer: knowing that two people have a fraught relationship and shouldn't be booked in the same small room, knowing that Thursday afternoons are blocked for a standing executive call that Copilot doesn't see because it's in a personal calendar, and making judgment calls on priority when five things conflict. Document your organizational knowledge explicitly: it's the moat Copilot cannot replicate.

Where office clerks go next

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

What each move takes

Many general office clerks already perform basic AP/AR data entry, expense logging, or petty-cash reconciliation as part of their generalist scope. Bookkeeping is a lateral specialization that deepens one vertical (financial recordkeeping) rather than broadening further. The QuickBooks ProAdvisor certification is achievable in several weeks of self-study and signals foundational proficiency to employers. Note that bookkeeping is also under significant automation pressure: this pivot buys time in a more specialized niche, not a safe harbor. The value is specificity: a "QuickBooks bookkeeper" commands more than a "general clerk" even if both roles are declining.

What you'd add
  • · QuickBooks Online (or Desktop) proficiency: QuickBooks ProAdvisor certification is the standard credential signal
  • · Double-entry bookkeeping: debits and credits, chart of accounts, trial balance
  • · Bank reconciliation: matching statement lines to ledger entries, investigating discrepancies
  • · Accounts payable cycle: invoice coding, 3-way matching, payment run basics
  • · Accounts receivable basics: invoicing customers, applying payments, aging report interpretation
What it takesMost of your skills carry over
Tools of the era

How has the work of office clerks changed since 1853?

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

  • Quill pen, dip pen, and handwritten ledgers

    The scrivener copied documents by hand: legal instruments, commercial correspondence, account entries. Volume was the bottleneck; a fast copyist might fill twelve foolscap sheets a day. The work required legibility, accuracy, and stamina under sustained boredom. Bartleby, Melville's 1853 clerk, sat at his desk "silently, palely, mechanically" copying.

  • Remington typewriter

    E. Remington & Sons began selling the first commercial typewriter in 1874 (contracts signed March 1873, market launch July 1874). A trained typist could produce five to ten times the daily copy of a handwriter. The copying task did not disappear: it became faster and higher volume, and within a generation the role had feminized as women entered the typewriter pool at lower wages than the male clerks they replaced.

    Effect on the work

    In 1870, women held a small share of US clerical jobs.

  • Comptometer and mechanical adding machines

    Dorr Felt patented the Comptometer in 1887: the first commercially successful key-driven calculating machine. Dedicated "Comptometer girls" trained at Comptometer Schools became office fixtures in accounting and finance departments. The arithmetic tasks that had been pencil-and-paper calculations became faster but remained human-operated. The adding machine defined a separate office specialization but also expanded the general clerk's toolset.

  • Xerox 914 photocopier

    The Xerox 914, introduced September 16, 1959, eliminated the carbon-paper and mimeograph copying tasks that had consumed significant clerk time. It made the copying step genuinely fast and delegable, but also created a new need: more copies meant more filing, more distribution, more records. Xerox grew between 1959 and 1970.

    Effect on the work

    Near-universal adoption in US office environments within several years of the 914's launch. Reduced per-copy labor while expanding total document volume.

  • IBM 1401 mainframe (batch data processing)

    Introduced October 5, 1959, the IBM 1401 was the first mass-market business mainframe, leased at a fraction of the cost of the alternatives. It automated payroll, accounts payable, and inventory data processing for medium-sized businesses. The operators who fed punch cards and read output were a new clerical subspecialty; the general clerks who had done ledger arithmetic by hand started giving way to batch-processing runs.

  • IBM PC and word processing software

    The IBM PC (August 12, 1981) followed by WordPerfect 5.1 (1989) and Microsoft Word put a general-purpose word processor on every clerical desk. Document creation, editing, and correspondence, previously handled by a typing pool, became self-service for knowledge workers. Clerks became computer operators, but the typing pool began to shrink.

    Effect on the work

    First office technology explicitly framed as headcount-reducing: firms that adopted word processing reported needing fewer clerical workers per document produced.

  • Email, corporate intranets, and ERP systems

    Email (Outlook 97, Lotus Notes) and enterprise ERP systems (SAP R/3 went mass-market in the mid-1990s) migrated the routing-and-records tasks from paper to digital. The clerk who sorted physical mail and filed paper correspondence partly became the clerk who routed email and maintained digital records. Data entry into ERP replaced data entry into ledgers. The work changed form; headcount was broadly flat.

  • Robotic Process Automation (UiPath, Automation Anywhere)

    UiPath (founded 2005) and Automation Anywhere brought bot-driven automation to the data-entry and cross-system copy-paste workflows that defined general clerical work. A bot that runs 24/7 handles the same ERP data entry a human clerk did in several hours. For the first time, the substitution was quantifiable per workflow and firms began acting on it at scale.

    Effect on the work

    BLS OOH 2024 explicitly cites "office automation software" as the primary driver of the projected employment decline for 43-9061 through 2034.

  • LLMs and AI document processing (ChatGPT, Copilot, Hyperscience)

    ChatGPT (November 2022) and Microsoft 365 Copilot (GA for enterprises November 2023) embedded generative AI directly into email, calendar, document creation, and records search: the task stack that defines the general office clerk. The Anthropic Economic Index (January 2026 report) matched 13% of sampled first-party Claude API transcripts in November 2025 to Office and Administrative Support tasks. That measures what businesses sent to Claude, not jobs gained or lost.

    Effect on the work

    Goldman Sachs (2023): 46% of tasks in the office and administrative support category are automatable, the highest share of any US occupational category. WEF Future of Jobs 2025: clerical and secretarial workers are the second-fastest-declining occupational cluster globally, with ~19 million roles projected for net displacement by 2030.

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Office Clerks, General employment and pay by year

On record since1853
Latest US employment2,464,940 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$45,010 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook-6% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • Canada (NOC 14100)

    Employment, 2020
    177,980, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 14100 General office support workers, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
    Median pay, 2020
    C$50,000, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 14100 General office support workers, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.

  • United Kingdom (UK SOC 4159)

    Employment, 2025
    728,000, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14): employee jobs in SOC 4159 Other administrative occupations n.e.c., United Kingdom, 2025 (ASHE "number of jobs", thousands x1000; excludes self-employment). Open Government Licence v3.0.
    Median pay, 2025
    £23,385, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14.7a): median gross annual pay for all employee jobs in SOC 4159 Other administrative occupations n.e.c., United Kingdom, 2025. Open Government Licence v3.0.

  • Australia (ANZSCO 5311)

    Employment, 2025
    286,600, ABS Labour Force Survey Official statistic Report an errorABS Labour Force Survey (Detailed), table EQ08: employed persons in ANZSCO 5311 General Clerks, national (summed across sex and state/territory), annual average of 4 quarterly estimates.
    Median pay, 2025
    A$74,776, ABS Employee Earnings May 2025 Official statistic Report an errorAnnualised (x52) from A$1,438 median weekly earnings. ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025: median pay for full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate, before tax. Surfaced via the Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profile.
View all 33 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
187063,000n/aCensus (IPUMS) Researched contextReport
1900250,000n/aDecennial Census 1970 Researched contextReport
1910n/a$780BLS historical bulletin 1970 Researched contextReport
1920n/a$1,400BLS historical bulletin 1970 Researched contextReport
1930750,000n/aDecennial Census 1970 Researched contextReport
19601,500,000n/aEst., BLS Bulletin 1312 Researched contextReport
19802,400,000n/aEst., BLS Researched contextReport
1986n/a$14,700BLS CPS 1986 Researched contextReport
1990n/a$16,800BLS CPS 1990 Researched contextReport
1999n/a$24,713Census 2000 Researched contextReport
20032,926,160$22,450BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
20042,970,660$22,770BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
20052,997,370$23,070BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
20063,026,710$23,710BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
20072,980,350$24,460BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
20082,906,600$25,320BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
20092,815,240$26,140BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
20102,789,590$26,610BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
20112,828,140$27,190BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
20122,808,100$27,470BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
20132,832,010$28,050BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
20142,889,970$28,670BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
20152,944,420$29,580BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
20162,955,550$30,580BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
20172,967,620$31,500BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
20182,972,930$32,730BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
20192,956,060$34,040BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
20202,788,090$35,330BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
20212,578,180$37,030BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
20222,517,350$38,040BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
20232,496,370$40,480BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
20242,510,550$43,630BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
20252,464,940$45,010BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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