Will ‘Say What You Pay’ Open Up Arts Jobs?

“What are your salary expectations?”

It is a familiar question, now standard in the modern-day job interview. But, without an advertised salary, it is difficult to answer. What has the employer budgeted? What is the going rate for the role? What are colleagues earning now? Can I even afford it?

This may be about to change. On 5 November, the government announced plans to make publishing salary information in job adverts a legal requirement, calling the proposal “say what you pay”. The government says 41 per cent of employers always publish salary ranges, while 18 per cent always publish specific salaries, citing a 2024 CIPD report. But many questions remain. The legislation has yet to be introduced and details of its scope and enforcement are still to come.

For those trying to build a career in the arts today, financial pressures can make it increasingly difficult to get established. High rents, student loan repayments and the cost of commuting leave less room to take a bet on a poorly paid job in the hope it might lead somewhere. The costs can start before someone gets a paid job: in parts of the sector, unpaid internships or work experience are still treated as a route into employment, requiring applicants to subsidise their own entry. There are also the less obvious costs of being present at evening openings and other events, where professional relationships are often built: travel, time away from paid work or caring responsibilities, and clothes suitable for the occasion. For artists, paid work alongside making their own work has also become an increasingly necessary part of building a sustainable career.

Research published in 2023 by academics from the Universities of Manchester, Edinburgh and Sheffield found that people from the most privileged backgrounds were around four times more likely to enter creative occupations than those from working-class backgrounds. Against this backdrop, the financial risks involved in pursuing a career in the arts raise an important question: who can afford to take them?

The absence of an advertised salary makes that calculation even harder. If you live outside London and are considering a job in the capital, how do you decide whether it is worth relocating or commuting if you do not know what you will earn?

The Sunday Painter Gallery. Courtesy The Sunday Painter

Who Knows What It Pays?

Will Jarvis, who cofounded The Sunday Painter gallery and Gertrude, a contemporary art platform connecting emerging and independent artists with buyers, says the lack of transparency around salaries engrains class bias within the UK's art sector.

“I’d say a huge factor in the UK that isn’t fully understood is the impact of class beyond the financial,” Jarvis says.

Jarvis says professional networks are “extremely important” when working out what different roles in the sector are worth.

“You’re at a huge disadvantage if you’re not connected to them,” he says. “The artworld remains shrouded in mystery, not only in how it operates and why, but also in any truthful, honest representation of its finances.”

Jarvis describes the artworld as having a “hidden language and secret codes”. Knowing what people earn is part of that knowledge. Someone with friends already working in galleries might know that £28,000 is a poor salary for a particular role, or that one organisation pays considerably better than another. Someone entering the sector without those connections may have no idea. The government’s proposed requirement could make some of that information available before someone applies. But it has not yet said whether employers will have to give a salary range, a specific figure or another benchmark, leaving open how much uncertainty the change will remove.

The Cost of Getting There

Meg Molloy, a freelance communications consultant and founder of Working Arts Club, sees the same problem in her network, where jobs are regularly posted without salaries. "For people from working-class backgrounds, that can make it harder to know what they should be paid or to feel confident asking," she says. And when someone is already working full time to make ends meet, spending hours applying and interviewing for a job only to discover that the salary is unviable can be a significant risk.

Geography adds another layer. When Molloy was trying to move from Kent to London, the cost of commuting made it difficult to take up work in the capital until she was earning enough to make the journey affordable. For some workers, the cost of travelling into London or living in the capital can eat up a quarter, or even a third, of their salary. Later, when she’d made the move, Molloy found that being honest about her previous salary affected what galleries were prepared to offer her, leaving her at the bottom of their salary range. A salary in a job advert could help an applicant weigh the cost of commuting before applying, but it would not make the work more affordable or prevent a previous salary from shaping an offer.

“If I was in London or had been able to work somewhere that paid better, I would have been at a better starting point,” she says.

For Ellie Hoskins, an artist based in Liverpool, the calculation is different. Her main focus is her own work, so she currently works part time and supplements her income through paid exhibitions and opportunities. She says moving to London would mean working full time to afford a worse living situation than the one she has now.

She has also seen London opportunities she would have liked to apply for, but which would have involved travelling from Liverpool several times a week. “The opportunities never pay enough to cover transport costs on top of the cost of time.” A published salary might make that calculation clearer at the outset; it would not change the costs themselves.

Staying in Liverpool has allowed Hoskins to build a career locally. She has worked with most of the city’s galleries and developed a reputation within the scene, something she cannot imagine being possible in London within the same timeframe.

“I’ve always said I’d love to live in London if I was rich and successful, and didn’t need to worry about my living situation.”

MoMA employees protest, 2015. Courtesy MoMA Local 2110

Finding Out What Work Pays

The sector is UK-wide, but opportunities, institutions and jobs remain concentrated in London. For people outside the capital, the cost of accessing those opportunities can become part of the decision about whether to apply at all.

Arts Council England’s 2024 Cultural Freelancers Study, based on more than 5,000 survey responses, found that 73 percent of participating freelancers earned less than £25,000 a year from freelance work. These findings concern freelance income rather than salaries from arts jobs, but the study also found that pay often failed to cover necessary travel costs, creating particular barriers for freelancers travelling to London. It identified the ‘London-centrism’ of the sector as a major concern.

The government’s announcement follows its Equal Pay and Pay Discrimination consultation, launched by the Office for Equality and Opportunity in July 2026. The consultation asked whether employers should have to publish pay information in job adverts or provide it to candidates in writing before an interview where there is no advert. It also asked whether they should give a pay range, a specific salary or another benchmark. 

Although the consultation has closed, the government says early analysis of its results found that 94 per cent of respondents supported requiring salary information in job adverts, including 93 per cent of businesses. It has said it will bring forward legislation as soon as possible, but has yet to set out what employers will have to disclose or how the requirement will be implemented and enforced.

But workers are already creating their own alternatives.

People are sharing salaries anonymously, comparing job titles and experience, and using spreadsheets, Instagram accounts and online communities to work out what their labour is worth. The UK-wide Arts Pay 2025 survey, which gathered 1,266 valid responses, found that only 18% of respondents knew what their peers were paid, while 60% of the 659 respondents who answered a question about transparency identified pay scales and salary bands as lacking transparency.

In August 2026, arts writer James Marshall prompted a wider discussion about arts salaries through a series of Instagram Stories highlighting job advertisements at London's major museums and galleries. After comparing a Tate Assistant Curator position advertised at £32,675 a year with Curatorial Assistant positions at New York's MoMA advertised at 72,000–75,000, more than 40 people working across architecture, fashion and interiors responded with similar concerns about pay in their own industries. 

#SayYourPay discussions, alongside communities such as Working Arts Club and Working Class Creatives Database, provide spaces for workers to share salary information, compare their experiences and establish what they should expect to earn, particularly when employers do not make this information available. The government's proposed requirement could make salary information easier to find before applying, but job adverts alone would not show what colleagues already doing the work are paid. For now, workers’ own networks continue to fill that gap.

V&A unionised staff outside the V&A South Kensington September 2025. Courtesy Prospect Union

From Disclosure to Collective Action

Industria, an artist-run organisation examining working conditions in the “artworld”, has investigated pay transparency through its Artist Leaks project.

In 2020, its founders submitted a Freedom of Information request to Tate asking for its artists’ fee structures. Industria says Tate responded that disclosure was “not in Tate’s commercial interest”. The organisation then asked artists to share information about their own fees and working conditions, gathering anonymous submissions between May 2020 and February 2022. Its 2023 inquiry, Structurally F–cked, drew on 104 submissions within scope, from 107 entries in total. It covered artists’ work for publicly funded institutions and visual arts programmes. The authors note that submissions were self-selecting and unverified, and that some artists may have submitted more than once, so the number of individual participants is unknown.

The inquiry estimated hourly rates by comparing recorded fees with artists’ estimates of the time spent on each project. It found a median hourly rate of £2.60. “Who can afford to work for low or no pay?” its founders ask.

For Industria’s founders, sharing pay information is important but cannot address the underlying problem. “Ultimately, the solution to the structural problems within the sector isn’t more networking and more conversations,” they say. “It’s organising politically.”

The government’s plan is about salary information in job adverts. It has not yet clarified how the requirement would apply to freelance commissions or short-term contracts. Industria’s findings therefore point to a problem the proposal, as announced so far, does not resolve: the value of work once it has been commissioned.

The organisation points to artists’ unions, including Artists’ Union England and Scottish Artists Union, which publish recommended rates of pay. The Scottish Artists Union’s current 2026–27 guidance, for example, provides hourly rates based on artists’ experience, as a guide for negotiating short-term contracts, sessional work and residencies.

Protests over art funding cuts at the Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh, October 2023. Courtesy Alamy

While Tate's response reflects one institution's position, employers may have wider concerns about making pay information public. A 2023 survey by the CIPD, the UK's professional body for HR and people development, found that among employers who were not transparent about pay, 29 per cent feared it could demotivate staff earning below the average, 29 per cent worried it would create unrealistic salary expectations and 28 per cent anticipated a staff backlash. The research covered employers across sectors, rather than the arts specifically.

These concerns have also arisen in the museum sector. In 2019, Fair Museum Jobs challenged the V&A over a Senior Curator position at its Museum of Childhood that did not include a salary. The museum's Head of HR explained that it sometimes withheld salary information to retain flexibility when recruiting. Following public criticism and intervention from the Prospect union, the salary range was eventually disclosed, but only after the application deadline had passed.

Some arts organisations have adopted more transparent approaches. Dulwich Picture Gallery publishes six organisational salary bands, ranging from London Living Wage to £64,000 and above, linked to levels of responsibility and competencies. It commits to advertising all vacancies with an indicative salary band. That gives applicants a range against which to judge a role; whether the government’s requirement will call for a range, a fixed figure or another form of salary information remains to be confirmed.

What Transparency Can’t Fix

Transparency does not automatically make a salary fair. Publishing a £25,000 salary does not make London rent cheaper, solve low funding for the arts or make unpaid labour sustainable. But it can stop someone spending weeks pursuing a job they cannot afford to take. It can give an applicant who has never worked in the sector a figure to negotiate against. And once someone is inside an organisation, it can make differences in pay easier to see.

There are legitimate questions for employers too. Pay bands can expose historic differences between staff, create pressure to increase salaries and reduce flexibility when recruiting. But these are not reasons to keep salaries hidden. They are reasons to examine how organisations value and pay their workers.

The government’s proposal could make salary information a standard part of applying for a job. Its effect will depend on what employers are required to disclose and how the rule is enforced; those details are still to come.

For people trying to enter the sector, knowing what a job pays should not depend on already being part of it. Sharing salaries is one way workers can challenge that imbalance, but responsibility cannot rest with individuals to piece together information that employers could make available themselves.

If the art world is serious about class mobility and widening access, should knowing what a job is worth depend on who you already know?

Seren Metcalfe is the founder and director of the Working Class Creatives Database CIC (WCCD).