Service Design Salary Report
How much do you need to earn to be happy? What does the future look like for service designers? The 2022 Service Design Salary Report can give you the tools to take your next career steps with confidence. Dive into data from over 1,000 service design professionals around the world to find insights on questions like these – and so much more.
Introduction 👋
- Service design professionals rate their satisfaction with their salary 7.3 out of 10.
- The average base salary of a service design professional across the globe is $68K, which is roughly the same as last year.
- There is still a salary gap between men and women, although it's smaller than last year. On average women earn 13.7% less than men.
- The number of professionals with service design in their job title has gone down from 68% to 60%.
- The average age of a service design professional is 35 years.
Welcome to the 2022 Service Design Salary Report. This follow-up to last year’s edition features more extensive data, new and improved questions, and additional insights that we hope will empower you to make smarter career decisions. Employers can also use this report to help benchmark if the compensation they offer is competitive with the market. Finally, we aim to make transparent the compensation gaps within the industry in order to contribute to a more inclusive field.
And while salary is important, it’s not the only factor. That’s why this year we’ve also included data on additional benefits such as health insurance and bonuses.
Inside, you’ll find three main sections: the introduction, the data, and the background story. The data is organized into various lenses of analysis that are ready for you to browse through.
Finally, please treat this report as a compass rather than Google Maps. Even though you’ll find hard numbers, remember that they represent a snapshot in time and aren’t definitive.
There are over 20,000 data points for you to play around with, so let’s go!
Table of Contents
What can I find in this report? 🔎
You’ll find answers to diverse questions such as:
- How much does an in-house SD professional from Germany earn per year in the health sector?
- What is the relationship between your job title and average base salary?
- What is the salary gap between junior and mid-level professionals from Brazil who work in consulting?
- Which industry offers the most additional benefits on top of your salary?
- Are in-house service designers more satisfied with their salary than their peers working on the agency side?
- And much more... In fact, the information presented in this report will probably lead you to ask questions that we can't imagine right now.
Of course, primary data on compensation is included. You’ll find base salary numbers as well as information on additional benefits. We chose to present base salary in USD (read why).
We also provide contextual data that helps put salaries in perspective, including country, age, job title, industry, company size, years of experience, seniority level, position and number of work hours.
Last but not least, all this information was incomplete without knowing the answer to this key question: How much do you need to earn to be happy? To find out, we asked people to rate how satisfied they are with their overall compensation and then asked them to explain their motivation for choosing their answer.
Reading guide 🧭
A key concept in this report are the 10 lenses used to organize and present the data. They are accompanied by almost 50 data visualizations in total.
These lenses break down the data and help you find what’s relevant to you. They are preselected based on the most common questions we received last year. But they aren’t the only way to look at the data. If there’s a perspective missing, let us know, and we’ll do our best to add it to the report.
Getting started
We know it can be overwhelming at first, so here’s what we suggest:
- Begin with the High-Level Overview and then browse the report to see what data is available. Decide what’s important to you and formulate your questions. What would you like to uncover?
- Deep dive into the report via the different lenses to find what you’re looking for. Play with the filters to tailor the information to your needs.
You can also check out the video below for tips on navigating the report, such as using filters to break down data and make comparisons. If you need additional help using this report, just leave a comment down below.
The data is provided in an interactive format rather than a static PDF so you can tailor it to your needs. It’s up to you which questions you want to ask this data set, what’s interesting to you, and how you interpret what you see.
Finally, it’s important that you’re getting the full picture. Please see the Background Story for more information about other important factors that influence salary as well as some points to consider about this report.
The salary report 💰
We invite you to explore and navigate the lenses and visualizations below to get answers to the questions most relevant to you. We’re curious what you’ll find, so let’s dig in!
High level salary & benefits overview
Glance at salaries and additional benefits by country. Then use the lenses that follow to investigate factors such as gender and work experience. Note that amounts are before taxes and don’t consider cost of living.
“Other” represents countries with fewer than five respondents (roughly 5% of total respondents).
High level salary & benefits overview
Who responded to the survey
The following charts break down respondents by aspects such as gender, position, work experience and title. To browse for your country, select it from the dropdown below.
Who responded to the survey
Salary Satisfcation Score
The Salary Satisfaction Score is new this year, and it’s critical to this report. You’ll find relevant data showing the satisfaction score breakdown included in each lens. How satisfied are SD professionals with their overall compensation? Does earning more make you happy?
The word cloud below gives you insight into the common factors in pay satisfaction. Is it just about the money? Select a score (range) and find out!
Salary Satisfaction Score
The gender bias
Is there a gender pay gap in the data for your country? The data revealed significant compensation gaps, which means we still have a lot of work to do toward an inclusive community.
We know it’s crucial that all respondents are represented in this report. All responses that did not make up comparable data sets were aggregated into “Other responses” in order to protect the privacy and anonymity of our participants.
The gender bias
Influence of position
SD professionals work in many contexts. Does compensation differ whether you’re working in-house, at an agency or as an independent freelancer? Select your country to learn how position influences your salary.
Influence of position
Effect of work experience
This lens helps you assess market maturity and learn how years of experience influence salary. Find out if the field is mostly newcomers or if there is a large community of experienced professionals. Please note that “formal” service design experience is subjective.
Effect of work experience
Seniority level
What is the salary gap between junior and mid-level team members? How much do senior service designers get paid? See what career advancement could mean for your salary.
Seniority level
Impact of job title
Service designers go by many names! What is the impact of having “service design” in your official job title or description? And what other titles do service designers go by? These charts provide some key insights.
Impact of job title
Industry & company size
This year, we wanted to know more about how the industry type can influence service designer salary and whether it really pays off to work for larger organizations. You can also learn which industries are most eager to hire service designers in your country.
Impact of industry & company size
Work hours & remote work
Does working more mean earning more? How does working remotely influence salary? With the rise of the four-day workweek and the new normal of remote work, we were curious how working hours affected salary.
This time-sensitive data will likely be different in a few months, so we’re excited to compare it with next year’s data.
Work hours & remote work
The background story 📖
Why this report?
What is the earning potential for service design professionals?
This is a common question, and everyone benefits when this data is publicly available – both service designers and those who hire them. But this kind of information is seriously lacking in our field.
How does compensation transparency help everyone?
- It helps set the right expectations for those interested in getting into the field, providing a realistic perspective (based on actual data) of the career opportunities they can expect.
- Armed with better compensation data, both salaried and independent service design professionals can better understand the value of their expertise and the industry. On the other hand, clients and employers gain insights into how they can attract and retain great talent.
- Finally, collecting and publishing this data exposes compensation gaps and bias within the field. Making these compensation inequalities visible increases diversity and inclusion. This report is a testimony to our commitment to actively breaking down inequalities in our field.
Ultimately, we hope that this report and the insights you can glean from it empower you to make smarter and more strategic career decisions.
Differences compared to last year
Our goal was to expand this year’s report beyond salary to look at the bigger compensation picture for service designers. To that end, we added quite a few new questions and collected data regarding: job level, type of industry, company size, work hours, percentage of remote work, type and value of additional benefits, and compensation satisfaction.
Another noteworthy change is that this year respondents could provide more specific information in some cases. They had the option to enter a specific salary value instead of selecting a predefined range, which we hope leads to more accurate data. We also included open fields where people could elaborate on their Salary Satisfaction Score and provide suggestions for future survey topics.
Survey setup
To try and keep this report as accurate as possible, we’d like to add a few comments about data bias and limitations:
How old is the data?
All the data represented in this report was collected in November 2021.
How accurate is this data?
Respondents provided values in USD. Those using a different currency did manual conversion, and the exchange rate at that moment applies. This was done to give a global benchmark in order to compare different geographic locations, although you should be careful making such comparisons. Also, in some cases, given salary was an estimate instead of an exact number. These factors influence the data you see in this report.
What about taxes and cost of living?
The report presents gross salaries and does not consider taxes or cost of living.
Was this anonymous?
Yes. Our respondents’ privacy is very important to us, and we don’t collect any personally identifiable information such as names or email addresses. Where appropriate, the data have been aggregated to protect the privacy of participants.
Important points to consider
This report represents a continual effort toward compensation transparency with help from the service design community. We’re proud of the extensive information presented here and the valuable insights available to service design professionals, but please note that the data has a few limitations and aspects you’ll want to keep in mind.
- We did our best to reach as many people from diverse backgrounds as possible, but they are still a small subsection of our global community. We also understand that some professionals prefer not to fill out surveys or share information about their salary history, so our data won’t accurately represent every service design community.
- In some cases, there wasn't enough data to create comparable categories, and data sets were aggregated in order to protect the privacy of participants. For example, countries with fewer than five responses are presented under the category “Other countries.”
- We ask for years of formal SD experience but not years of work experience in general. It’s important to remember that your years of expertise in other areas can have a significant impact on salary.
- Some countries and regions have very few data points or even none at all. It would be impossible to identify patterns or draw conclusions based on the information available. We’re committed to expanding our reach to those who would like to participate, and we welcome you to leave a comment if you have ideas on how to better involve these communities next year.
- We included questions that we found significant but that are subjective and can have imprecise answers, for example, the monetary value of benefits such as health insurance or what type of experience constitutes “formal” service design experience. As a result, this data is open to interpretation based on each situation.
- For the average salary, the report presents the median value rather than the mathematical average to prevent a single entry from Jeff Bezos skewing the data and making every service designer a millionaire.
- The salary hasn’t been normalized against the number of work hours per week. You can see a detailed breakdown of this in the lens on work hours.
- To get a good grasp of the situation, it's almost always necessary to take multiple perspectives into consideration. For instance, the average salary in the Netherlands overall could be quite high because a lot of senior level professionals responded to the survey. But in order to know that, you need to look into that lens as well. So please take the time to dig deeper to truly understand where the numbers are coming from.
Need a different format?
Google Data Studio (the platform used to visualize the data) does have some accessibility limitations. Please let us know if you would like specific parts of the report in another format in order to easily explore the data (such as PDF or CSV export). Requests are reviewed case by case and we’ll do our best to provide it for you.
Note on salaries and other factors ☝️
Of course, salary is a critical aspect in making more insightful career decisions and understanding how the SD industry is evolving, but it’s not the only one you need to consider. We believe that being more knowledgeable about your worth is empowering, but it doesn’t give you the full picture.
You’ll also want to consider other important factors, such as cost of living, GDP, taxes and other expenses unique to your location. You know your situation best. How does your location affect your salary? Could you earn effectively more elsewhere? Keep these factors in mind as you consider your opportunities.
What's next 🎯
Just like last year, you shared many ideas for how the report could be further improved, and these ideas help make this report more valuable to the entire community. Thank you for that! These suggestions include deeper insight into these areas:
- The demographic diversity within service design
- The remote work situation
- How educational background influences salary
- Understanding why people are motivated to participate in the survey
- Better questions for those without regular working hours or salary
This year’s survey also asked for future topics you’d like to see a new report on. These responses were eye-opening, and we’re motivated to move forward with these ideas to create more reports on topics meaningful to you, so stay tuned!
- What do service designers look for in companies when seeking a new employer?
- What is the employer's perspective on hiring service designers?
- How does service design relate to other areas of an organization?
- What are common growth and career paths in service design?
- Which tools do service design professionals use?
- What are good training and development opportunities?
- What are the trends in service design?
- And many more…
Acknowledgements 🙏
This report wouldn’t be here without the generous input from the service design community. So if you’ve participated or helped spread the word about it, thank you!
A tremendous help this year also came from our partners. It’s the support from respected organizations such as these, that see the importance of this topic and rally around it, that bring this report to life.
Many others contributed to making this year’s report happen. A special word of gratitude for Daniele Catalanotto, Adam Rakús, Linn Vizard, Mahmoud Abdelrahman and Sarah Bercot. Thank you for all your help and support along the way.
About the author
The yearly Service Design Salary Report report is an initiative from Service Design Jobs. Service Design Jobs is the only online spot providing a daily updated list of real service design jobs from companies actually hiring service designers across the globe.
The initiative is led by Marc Fonteijn, founder of Service Design Jobs and the Service Design Show.
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Your turn 💪
We created this report to serve our community, and we rely on feedback from you. If the data inspired new questions that you’d like us to investigate, or you didn’t find what you were looking for, we want to know!
Feel free to leave a comment or reach out to us via team@servicedesignjobs.com with any suggestions, feedback or ideas for perspectives we missed.
This report is carefully crafted, but if you spot a mistake, we’d be grateful if you let us know.
3 Responses
Hi!
Thanks so much for doing this. The data is presented very clearly and the analysis gives a proper overview. I would love to dig a little bit deeper into the data to truly understand certain nuances (relevant for our company). Is it possible to receive a CSV export?
Thanks again,
Michaël
sorry if I missed it – are these salary figures in local currency or all converted to one currency? ie is it all $USD or are the Australian ones in AUD$ etc? thanks
It’s all USD.