PDN's Salary Survey: Who Earns What?

Do women photographers earn less than male photographers? Do photo editors or art buyers earn higher salaries? If you're a wedding photographer, should you consider moving to the Midwest? If you're a studio manager, should you move to the West Coast? Who earns more money after 20 years in the business: a photographers' agent or an ad agency art buyer?

Thanks to the overwhelming response to PDN's first ever salary survey, we have answers to those questions. A total of 2,114 individuals from every sector of the industry responded to our survey, answering questions about their 2005 income. We conducted the survey in April through PDNOnline.

As you'll see in the charts below (including those reprinted from our June issue), we have aggregated and analyzed the data for average and median salaries by occupation. For certain occupations, we broke out average income by factors such as gender, region, population density (ie, whether they are based in a big city or small town) and years of experience.

The largest category of respondents by far was self-employed photographers. In all, 1,040 of them completed our survey. They included 244 advertising photographers, 229 photojournalists and editorial photographers, 200 wedding and portrait photographers, 101 corporate photographers, plus dozens of others specializing in architecture and interiors, stock, music and entertainment, and other niches.

The rankings of freelance photographer specialties by income was mostly--but not entirely--predictable. Male photographers still vastly outnumber female photographers; more surprising, however, was the great disparity in their earnings. (By comparison, the mean salaries for male and female reps are almost identical.) Advertising, corporate, and stock photographers earn twice as much (or more) than photojournalists and editorial shooters. Music and entertainment photographers do signi?cantly better than photojournalists/editorial shooters, though not as well as the advertising and corporate types. And pity the ?ne-art photographers, who obviously get up in the morning for reasons other than money. The surprise was the lower-than-expected median income for the 27 fashion photographers who responded; they had a few high earners who brought the group average up, but the low earners among them are on par with photojournalists.


(Here's a refresher course in statistics. Mean income is the average income; it's calculated by adding all the incomes in a category and dividing by the number of responses for that category. Median income is the income point at which half of the respondents earn less, and half of the respondents earn more. In many instances, the mean is higher than the median; that's because a few big-earners pulled up the average, or mean, income.)

Wedding