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2024 Salary Report

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The Future of Service Design

How much can a service design professional earn? What about other benefits? Do agencies pay more? Do you need a service design degree to earn more? What's the influence of your previous role? What level of salary will make you the happiest?

What's the future for service design professionals in a global market?

The 2024 Service Design Salary Report aims to unveil the industry’s salary data and give you transparent information to help you shape your career path and make smarter, better-informed decisions in your career or hiring. Dive deeper into the responses from over 1300 service design professionals to discover answers to your salary questions and much more. With community members rating the relevancy of our questions a 4.3 out of 5, we know you’ll discover insights to help guide your path.
SHOW ME THE DATA

Noteworthy Insights

Here are some interesting takeaways we found from this year’s data:
  • Salary Satisfaction Score is 7.0/10 (down from 7.3 in 2023)
  • Median base salary is up significantly from last year (+12.4%)
  • The percentage of professionals with "service design" in their job title continues to decline
  • The gender pay gap in our dataset shows a slow decline (down to 12.1%)
  • The most common department that service design professionals report to is the design department

This report is made possible by

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Introduction

Welcome to the 2024 Service Design Salary Report. Since 2021, thousands of professionals have used the data in these reports to guide them in their careers. With their feedback, we’ve strived to improve this fourth edition by featuring even more extensive data, a larger dataset with record-high respondents, new questions diving deeper into the holistic offers available for service design professionals, and much more.
 
This report is a tool for service design professionals to navigate their options as they progress in their careers. We also believe that compensation transparency is the key to creating a more inclusive and more mature field for everyone. 
 
Further, we know from feedback that this report helps employers understand the current job market and expectations of service design professionals from all around the world so that they can provide fair compensation for the talent they want.

7.3/10

Salary Satisfaction Rate
of Service Design professionals
Median Base Salary

across the globe

$62K

Down 9% compared to last year

Gender Bias

on average, women earn 12.5% less than men

12.5%

Last year the gap was 13.7%

Job Title

professionals with "service design" in their job title

48%

Declining two years in a row

Average age

of a Service Design professional

35

Same as last year

Who is this Report For?

So, why should we care about compensation transparency? It’s simple: It helps both service design professionals and employers looking to hire them.

For Professionals

  • Clear and realistic expectations. This report provides the right expectations and realistic perspectives for both working service design professionals and those interested in getting into the field.
  • Understand opportunities across roles. It is a tool for you to better gauge opportunities and make the right decisions for your career. 
  • Break the biases and promote inclusivity. Just like many other fields, service design still faces a gender gap in compensation. And the truth is that inclusivity goes beyond gender. By sharing this data, we hope to start conversations about these biases and help promote inclusivity and diversity in the field.

For Employers

  • More effective hiring. The data in this report allows employers to make better decisions during the hiring process and have a higher chance of attracting the talent they need.
  • Increased retention rate. Collecting and publishing this data allows employers to have a realistic insight into what it takes to keep their talent onboard.
  • Higher job satisfaction. By understanding the different factors that impact job satisfaction, employers can offer more relevant benefits and a working environment that boosts morale.

What Answers Can I Get From This Report?

Inside this report, you’ll be able to answer your most pressing questions, such as these:
  • Am I being paid fairly?
  • Which industries offer the highest salaries?
  • What are the pay gaps and inequalities in service design?
  • How has the salary of service design professionals developed over the last years?
  • What is the median salary in my country?
The first question can only be answered by you. By gaining a picture of the service design field as a whole and salary range across different locations, seniority, years of experience and more, you can use this data to help benchmark your own compensation package. With access to more transparent data, you can assess and negotiate for what’s important to you. 
 
To make the most out of your research, we encourage you to take the time to understand the reading guide below. At first glance, the data can seem a bit overwhelming, and we created this guide to help you navigate the report more easily. 
 
The data is organized into different lenses that act as your entry point. Each of these lenses helps you combine data points such as salary satisfaction and country to answer your questions more in-depth. You can understand more about how to use the lenses in the reading guide below.
 
Please remember that this report only serves as a compass. It’s not a map!
 
While this guide contains valuable insights to direct your career journey, it is only a representation of the salary situation and isn’t definitive by any means.
 
There are over 30,000 data points to explore in the report. If you know what you’re looking for and are ready to dive in, feel free to jump to the data.
 
To better understand the context of the respondents and how this report can help you make informed decisions, please refer to the background and context chapter

How to Get the Most Out of This Report

As we mentioned, there are many data points available for you to explore and draw out your own insights. To get started, we used 18 lenses in this report to organize and present the data in order to provide you with the information you need. 
 
Each lens represents a starting point (of a question). So, if you want to know if working more hours leads to a higher salary, you would take the Work Hours lens as your starting point. If you want to know how much a senior service design professional earns, you should take the Seniority Level lens as your starting point.
 
Each of the lenses breaks down the data to help you find what's specifically relevant to you and answer your questions. If there’s anything you want to discover more or feel like we’ve missed, do let us know so we can do our best to add it to the report or provide you with that data.

Getting Started

Don’t worry! 30,000 data points may seem daunting, but we can suggest a simple way for you to start navigating this goldmine of data:

  1. Begin with the High-Level Overview and work your way down. This report is designed to present the data as simply as possible. From there, you might have some specific questions in mind. If so, you can start with step 2.

  2. Deep dive into the report by exploring the different lenses to answer your questions. You can use the provided filters to tailor the information to your needs.

Here’s a quick video to help you learn how to use the different lenses:

Let’s dive in!

The 2024 Salary Report

High-Level Overview

01
Here, you’ll find a general overview of salaries, the Satisfaction Score, and additional benefits by country. Explore the different lenses available to see other factors, such as gender and work experience. 
 
Please note that “Other” represents data points with fewer than ten respondents. 
Filters
Year:
Select countries to compare:
Median salary by country ($USD)
Average satisfaction score by country

Who Responded

02

Get to know the respondents by going through the following charts. You can select the country that you’re most interested in and find out different aspects of the respondents’ profiles such as gender, position, work experience, and job titles. 

Filters
Select your country:
By gender
By age
By job title
By experience level
By position
By industry
By company size
By service design degree
By previous role
By country

Ikigai

03
Ikigai is a Japanese term that means "reason for being" or finding one's life purpose. We introduced this question in the survey last year to gain a better understanding of what drives and motivates service design professionals. It provides a more detailed and nuanced answer compared to the Satisfaction Score.
 
Respondents were asked to select which of the following options applied to them: "I enjoy my work" (💚), "I am good at my work" (💪), "The world needs what I do" (🌍), and "I get paid fairly for my work" (💰). They could choose as many options as they wanted. The percentages in the chart indicate how many respondents selected each option.
Filters
Select your country:
Year:
Ikigai percentages

Gender Bias

04
Just like previous years, we’ve seen similar struggles with the gender pay gap in the field. We are still a long way to providing inclusive compensation and equal opportunities for all service design professionals – no matter their gender. See below how it affects your country.
 
It is important to represent every person in this section of the survey. So, we have aggregated other data as “other responses” so that we can continue to be as accurate as possible while protecting the privacy of our participants.
Filters
Select your country:
Show years:
Median salary by gender ($USD)
Satisfaction score by gender
Respondents breakdown by gender

Minority

05

How does minority status affect career movement for service design professionals? What biases are at play for professionals both on the job and in the job market? To get a better look at the answers to questions like these, we asked respondents if they identified as a member of a minority group. Their written responses revealed three main categories: Ethnicity & Nationality, Sexual Orientation, and Identity & Background.

Filters
Select your country:
Year:
Median salary by minority ($USD)
Satisfaction score by minority
Respondents breakdown by minority

Position

06

Service design professionals work in many contexts. Namely, there are in-house service design professionals who are full-time or part-time employees in a certain company, others who work at an agency, and some who are independent freelancers. Does working at an agency mean higher compensation? Or do the benefits outweigh compensation in a full-time in-house position? Select your country to learn more about how each context can affect your salary.

Filters
Select your country:
Years:
Dimensions:
Median salary by position ($USD)
Satisfaction score by position
Respondents breakdown by position

Work Experience

07

You would expect that having more work experience results in a higher salary. But is that the case? And if so, how big is that difference? The charts in this section help us to uncover the facts. The overview is broken down into overall work experience and service design-related work experience.

Filters
Select your country:
Years:
Dimensions:
Median salary ($USD) - based on years of general work experience
Satisfaction score - based on years of general work experience
Median salary ($USD) - based on years of service design work experience
Satisfaction score - based on years of service design related work experience

Seniority Level

08

What is the salary gap between junior and mid-level team members? How much do entry-level service designers get paid? And does career advancement increase Satisfaction Score? Explore these charts to see how job level can affect your salary and happiness.

Filters
Select your country:
Years:
Dimensions:
Median salary by seniority level ($USD)
Satisfaction score by seniority level
Respondents breakdown by seniority level
Seniority level by average years of general work experience

Job Title

09

Our field is a mashup of different titles, roles, and job descriptions. Because of this, service designers go by many different job titles depending on the company they work for. How does having “service design” in your official title impact salary? Let’s find out!

Filters
Select your country:
Years:
Dimensions:
Median salary by job title ($USD)
Satisfaction score by job title
Respondents breakdown by job title

Previous Role

10

This lens provides insight into the career journey that service design professionals are taking. Does a professional's previous role affect salary or other benefits? If so, how?

Filters
Select your country:
Years:
Dimensions:
Breakdown
Salary

Industry

11

Service design is (needed) everywhere and in every single business, and a service design professional can provide immense value for any business that interacts with humans. We asked respondents what industries they work in to find out how that impacts salary and satisfaction. These charts also give us an indication of the industries that are more eager to hire service design talent. Useful for your next job hunt!

Filters
Select your country:
Years:
Dimensions:
Median salary by industry ($USD)
Satisfaction score by industry
Respondents breakdown by industry

Reporting Department

12
By asking participants which department they report to, we can get insights on where service design is positioned inside organizations and whether or not that influences compensation (and how much).
 
Note that this includes only data from respondents with in-house positions.
Filters
Select your country:
Years:
Dimensions:
Median salary by industry ($USD)
Satisfaction score by industry
Respondents breakdown by industry

Design Maturity

13

We asked respondents to rate the overall design maturity of their organization, and this lens looks at the impact of that maturity level. Does it pay to target more mature organizations? Are service design professionals more satisfied in organizations with a higher maturity? Do these organizations necessarily value design more?

Filters
Select your country:
Years:
Dimensions:
Salary
Satisfaction
Breakdown

Company Size

14

Another important question we asked you is about the size of the company you work in. Is it better to look for a job in a large tech firm or would a small agency compensate fairly too? Find your answers below.

Filters
Select your country:
Years:
Dimensions:
Median salary by company size ($USD)
Satisfaction score by company size
Respondents breakdown by company size

Work Hours

15
Who works the most? We asked participants to share how many hours, on average, they work per week – the number they're actually working, not their contracted hours. You can explore the data by country and then break it down in different dimensions. Play around and see what you uncover.
 
We’re solely focusing on work hours in this section and not salary, as there are too many factors at play to make a meaningful apples-to-apples comparison.
Filters
Select your country:
Select area of interest:
Years:
Dimensions:
Average number of work hours per week

Remote Work

16

Does remote work still play a significant role in salary and other benefits? Which industries are hiring the most remote workers? Are in-house service design professionals or agency folks more in the office? Find the answers to these questions and more in the charts below.

Filters
Select your country:
Select area of interest:
Years:
Dimensions:
Percentage of work done remotely

Degrees

17

Who holds a formal service design degree? Are you more likely to find service design professionals with a degree in the US or Finland? How does gender factor in? You can even look at the salary ranges to find the degree with the highest percentage of service design graduates.

Filters
Select your country:
Select area of interest:
Years:
Dimensions:
Percentage of respondents with a formal service design degree

Negotiation

18

Who is negotiating their salary? Discover which industries are more open to negotiation and explore the cultural differences between countries. You can also see whether juniors or seniors tend to come up with a counteroffer. This is a fun one!

Filters
Select your country:
Select area of interest:
Years:
Dimensions:
Who negotiates their salary the most?

Background and Context

Why Is This Report Important?

Each year since 2021, this report is created by and for service design professionals. We understand that salary and benefits are affected by many factors, and we aim to showcase that in this research. These factors include different benefits in a package, macro factors such as industry and country, or even individual factors of the candidate and position such as seniority level, previous role, and more. 
 
Within a quickly growing field that's still taking shape, service design professionals and employers often don’t have a clear understanding of how to value the role and compensate accordingly. By promoting transparency, we are changing that. Providing more information that is readily available for both professionals and employers helps to mature our field and grow the credibility of the industry.

Notes On Salaries

While important, salary is not the only factor to consider in job satisfaction, especially given the increased availability of work from home and more global opportunities. We even found from our surveys that those in higher salary scales aren’t much happier.
 
We should also consider that compensation packages can have many more additional benefits, such as health insurance and bonuses, that can be better perceived by potential employees. Other intangible benefits can include cultural fit, great team and colleagues, and finding their purpose in the role. This report showcases some of the other benefits that can be available for service designers too.

The Differences From Last Year

In the spirit of continuous improvement, this year’s survey has even more data than the first three editions. With your feedback, we've made the following upgrades:
  • You now have the ability to visualize and compare data across multiple years (enabling you to spot trends) on specific charts with such data available.
  • Participants could submit their salaries in their local currencies instead of USD.
  • New lenses that provide deeper insights include Minority, Reporting Department, and Design Maturity.
These upgrades hopefully will help you get an even better understanding of the factors that influence salaries and Satisfaction Scores.

Methodology

For deeper understanding and more accurate insights, here you'll find details about the data collected and the limitations of our study.

Limitations and Considerations

We’re proud to continuously work on improving the report year after year in order to help you find the insights that make a difference. However, please note that there are some limitations to keep in mind because of the sample size and scope of the respondents.

  1. Diversity

    We do our best to reach as many service design professionals from diverse backgrounds as possible, but the respondents in the report still only represent a subsection of our global community. We understand that some professionals prefer not to fill out surveys or share information about their salary, so the data doesn’t accurately represent every service design community. 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.

    Number of Respondents

    Some countries, job levels, and subgroups have a low number of respondents, so the data will be less reliable and definitive. More respondents in the future will help us to get a clearer, more precise picture. 

    2. Accuracy

    Respondents were asked to fill in their annual salary based on full-time employment, no matter if they’re fully employed, part-time, a freelancer, or own an agency. This allows us to have clear, comparable results. The salary is presented as a median in the charts (unless stated otherwise) to avoid any service design billionaire skewing the data.

    Context

    Using just one lens most likely won't definitively answer your career questions. It’s important to understand the broader context to get a good grasp of the situation. For example, service design professionals in the Netherlands may indicate a high salary, but this group could also have many senior-level professionals who answered the survey. To understand what's really going on, it’s important to explore the data using multiple lenses.

    Subjectivity

    We included questions that we found important but that are subjective and will have imprecise answers, for example, if they consider themselves to be part of a minority, the design maturity level of their organization, and the salary satisfaction score. As a result, this data is open to interpretation based on each situation.

What's next

We believe that the report is valuable in its current state, but we also recognize that there is always room for improvement. In fact, we already have some ideas on how to enhance it further. Here are a few of the improvements we are considering for next year:

  • Clarify inclusion criteria: Some participants expressed confusion about whether certain qualifications fell under specific categories. Clarifying inclusion criteria for academic qualifications or professional certifications could address this.
  • Explore common challenges: Participants suggested adding a section on the most common challenges faced in the service design industry. This could provide valuable insights into the pain points experienced by professionals.
  • A detailed breakdown of bonuses: Include a question that breaks down the bonus amount further, distinguishing between bonus targets, company retirement matches, and the value of healthcare and other perks. This could offer a more comprehensive view of compensation packages.
  • Investigate job switching patterns: Looking at when and how do service designers switch jobs, considering factors such as promotions and global job trends, could provide valuable insights into career trajectories within our field.
  • Include mental health: Since mental health plays such a significant role in work life, adding questions on this topic could provide a better understanding of job satisfaction.
  • Understand impact: What kind of impact do service design professionals themselves believe they are making? Including a question on whether people feel their work has made an impact could provide interesting insights for different industries and work conditions.
These were the goals that we formulated in 2023 including their status.
🟢 implemented
🟠 work in progress
🔵 on the todo list
  • 🟢 Making the report more accessible across various devices
  • 🟢 Adding the option to compare data across multiple years
  • 🟠 Enhancing the clarity and readability of the language used
  • 🔵 Providing an option to download the charts
  • 🔵 Exploring additional data visualization methods beyond our current format
  • 🟠 Clarifying what falls under the "other" categories
  • 🔵 Adding filtering capabilities to exclude outliers from the data

Do you have any suggestions or feedback on how we can make the report even more useful? We'd love to hear from you! Please leave a comment below or send us a message at team@servicedesignjobs.com.

Acknowledgment

We owe a debt of gratitude to our amazing service design community, without whom this report would not have been possible. This report is the result of the efforts and contributions made by service design professionals like you. Whether you participated in the survey or helped us spread the word, thank you! We would also like to extend our special thanks to the beta testers who took the time to provide us with valuable feedback. A big shoutout to Elle, David, Jacob, Denisa, Elise, Anu, and Amira.

Furthermore, we would like to express our heartfelt appreciation to our partners. We are thankful to these leading companies who partnered with us to break biases, promote compensation transparency, and create a better work environment for service design professionals. Your support is truly invaluable.

marc fonteijn

About the Author

The Service Design Salary Report is an initiative by Service Design Jobs, the only online resource for up-to-date job opportunities exclusively for service design professionals worldwide.
 
Committed to providing tools and opportunities, and transforming the careers of fellow service designers, this initiative is led by Marc Fonteijn. Marc is the founder of Service Design Jobs and the Service Design Show. With over 15 years of experience in the field, he has made it a mission to provide service design professionals with any help needed to take their careers to the next level. 

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Response From The Community

This year, over 250 participants left a comment at the end of the survey. I've read every single one. Thank you for sharing your ideas, suggestions and praise with us. Below is a glimpse into just a few of the comments that stood out and that I want to share with you.

I think this is amazing that youre doing this, thank you for providing transparency across the industry - Canada - 25 years

Last year’s report help me be more aware of how much of a raise I should get this year. And I got it! Thank you 🙏🏽 - Portugal - 31 years

Keep up the great work! This is such an important survey and I've been making use of the reports of the previous two years. - Finland - 27 years

Thank you so much for doing that as it is thanks to the last report that I could negotiate my current salary, so it is important to have those standards and you are creating them. - United Kingdom - 31 years

The survey is great work and year after year provides tremendous value to the community - Italy - 31 years

FAQ

This report is created by the Service Design Jobs team for the service design professional community. We have issued a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license that allows anyone in the world to use this study in any manner consistent with its terms. If you have questions or doubts about your specific case, please get in touch.

Please let us know if you would like specific parts of the report in another format 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 them for you.

All the data represented in this report was collected in November 2023.

We present values in USD to give a global benchmark to compare different geographic locations, but you should be careful making such comparisons. This year, respondents provided their salary in local currency, and we converted it to USD on using the exchange rate at that moment. (In previous years, participants provided salaries in USD.) Also, in some cases, the given salary was an estimate instead of an exact number due to the nature of some of their professions (project-based, part-time, etc.). These factors influence the data you see in this report.

For ease of comparable data and insights, we’ve decided to have one currency to represent in the survey. Our respondents come from all over the world, and USD is a simple base currency to use for comparison purposes.

No. The report presents gross salaries and does not consider taxes or the cost of living.

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. For example, we observe gender aggregation to preserve the privacy of respondents.

This report represents a snapshot in time of a portion of the service design field. With a sample size of about 1300 respondents, it’s not wise to draw any definitive conclusions. Treat it as a compass rather than a map.

You can email us at team@servicedesignjobs.com to request a copy.

This metric is calculated as the average rating given by respondents to the question "How satisfied are you with your total compensation?" The rating scale ranged from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest).

We know; it seems like we're obsessed with bar charts. While we did experiment with other types of charts, we found that the bar chart was often the most effective and easy-to-read option for displaying the data. Plus, it looks great on screens of all sizes. That being said, if you're using the report to write an article or tell a specific story, you may find that another type of chart would work better. If you're on that journey and need some guidance, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us. We're always happy to help!

Unfortunately, there isn't a PDF version of the report available right now. We designed the report to be interactive so that you can sort and filter the data according to your specific needs and preferences. This allows you to personalize your experience with the report and explore the data in a more flexible way. By not offering a static PDF document, we avoid making assumptions about the information that you might find most valuable.

Thanks for doing this. It is extremely valuable insight for the community

Head of design (44)

Very relevant research!

Service designer (37)

Thanks for your good work on making the job market more transparent!

Service designer (33)

Thank you for doing this kind of work to foster transparency and collaboration in a field that is still nascent in the US.

Service designer (38)

Great that you do this! Helps to negotiate and justify salary requirements.

Service designer (42)

Thanks for your efforts in educating and informing the sd community 🙏

Service designer

I think this survey is super important to show salary transparency for the service design industry. Thank you!

Service designer (32)

thanks for doing this 🙏🏼

Service designer (35)

Join Us!

Every year, we create this report with the intention of serving the service design community, and we rely heavily on feedback from you to make it better. If the data in this report sparked new questions that you’d like us to investigate, or if you couldn't find the information you were looking for, we want to hear from you!
Please don't hesitate to leave a comment or reach out to us via team@servicedesignjobs.com with any suggestions, feedback, or ideas for perspectives we may have missed.
 
Join our mission to promote transparency, break biases, and mature our field.

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