What curatorial, museum and gallery jobs actually pay — pulled from postings that stated a real figure, not estimated or modelled from job titles.
Maintained by CuratorSearch, a daily-updated board of curatorial-sector vacancies gathered directly from institutions' own careers pages.
As of 2026-09-06, 24% of the 187 curatorial and museum jobs live on CuratorSearch state a salary. Among those that do, the median advertised salary is ≈€58,480/year — figures exactly as advertised by the employer, never converted or estimated, and including German TV-L/TVöD public-sector pay grades decoded into euro ranges.
This likely understates true disclosure: grade-mapping currently covers the German public sector only, so UK and US pay-transparency postings aren't parsed yet. Full methodology: curatorsearch.com/salaries#methodology.
curatorial-salaries.csv— 139 observations from 96 institutions, snapshot of 2026-09-06curatorial-salaries.json— the same observations with dataset metadata
Each row is one observed posting: URL, title, institution, category, location, currency, min/max pay, pay period, whether the figure was a scale pledged "in Anlehnung an" (analogous to) rather than binding, and when it was captured. Once a salary is observed it's archived permanently — a posting closing doesn't remove its figure from the record.
The archive has a DOI on Zenodo. 10.5281/zenodo.22544232 is the concept DOI and always resolves to the newest snapshot; each snapshot also has its own version DOI on the Zenodo record.
Samman, N. (2026). CuratorSearch Curatorial Pay Archive (snapshot 2026-09-06) [Data set]. CuratorSearch. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22544232
GitHub shows a "Cite this repository" button from CITATION.cff.
This repo is a point-in-time snapshot, updated by hand. For the always-current data, use the live files, which are regenerated daily:
Treat the date above as the snapshot date, not "as of today."
CC BY 4.0 — free for any purpose, with attribution. Cite as above, or as "CuratorSearch Curatorial Pay Archive, curatorsearch.com/salaries" with the date. See LICENSE.