Decide what a country, a company or a family keeps forever, then make sure people can find it.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Typical
$64,550
Entry or part time
$39,970
Director or federal senior
$110,550
The national median is $64,550 a year, and the bottom tenth start near $39,970. That bottom number is real: small historical societies and short-term grant-funded projects pay badly, and they are where a lot of people start.
$40,000 to $52,000
Processing archivist, often on a one or two year grant
Grant-funded project jobs are extremely common in this field. They are real experience but they end on a fixed date, and many new archivists move cities two or three times before landing something permanent.
$110,550 a year
What the top tenth earn, often in federal or large university archives
Federal archivist jobs are posted on USAJOBS (the federal government's hiring site), pay on the published federal salary scale, and come with a pension and eligibility for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is a cheap bachelor's degree, community college credits then an in-state public university, followed by a master's that costs nothing because an assistantship in the university's own archives covers tuition and pays a stipend. The high end is four years of in-state public tuition plus a two year master's in library and information science paid out of pocket. Ask about funded assistantships before you borrow anything, because they also give you the experience employers screen for. The Certified Archivist exam is voluntary and costs a few hundred dollars.
Many graduate programs fund students through assistantships in the university's own archives, which pays a stipend, cuts tuition and gives you the experience employers want. Ask about that before you borrow anything.
Universities
Special collections and university records. The biggest single employer.
Federal, state and city government
Steady, pensioned, and slow to hire.
Museums and historical societies
Often small budgets and part-time roles.
Corporations
Banks, drug companies, sports teams and studios keep their own archives, and they pay the best in the private sector.
Religious bodies and hospitals
Quietly hold enormous old record collections and need someone to run them.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
A master's degree is the standard ticket, and volunteer hours matter as much as grades.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
History, English and any computer class. Volunteer at a local historical society or library to see whether the work suits you.
Bachelor's degree
4 years
History, English, American studies or anything that teaches you to read old documents carefully. A second language helps.
Master's degree
2 years
Usually a Master of Library and Information Science with an archives concentration, sometimes a master's in history or public history. The Society of American Archivists keeps a directory of archival education programs.
Practicum, internship or assistantship
During school
Processing a real collection end to end is what gets you hired. Do this during the master's, not after.
First professional job
After graduation
Often a grant-funded processing position. Expect to move for it.
History
Especially anything where you handle primary sources instead of a textbook.
English
You will write descriptions all day, and they have to be precise.
A foreign language
Spanish, German and Latin all open up collections that fewer people can process.
Computer science or web design
Digital preservation is the growth end of this field.
No state licenses archivists and the title is not protected. The Academy of Certified Archivists runs a voluntary Certified Archivist exam, and the credential runs on a five-year cycle that you have to keep renewing. Some government and large institutional postings ask for it or prefer it, and most do not. The Society of American Archivists also issues subject certificates, including a Digital Archives Specialist certificate, that carry real weight when you are competing for a digital preservation role.
Public universities with information schools
Most states have at least one. In-state tuition plus an assistantship is the affordable route.
Public history master's programs
A history department alternative that leans toward museums, exhibits and local archives.
Online programs
Several accredited library and information science degrees are fully online, which lets you keep working while you study.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Digital preservation
Keeping files readable for decades as formats die. The fastest growing part of the job and the hardest to hire for.
Records management
Deciding what a company must keep and for how long. Pays better than historical archives.
Audiovisual and film archives
Old tape and film rot on a schedule, and few people know how to handle them.
Oral history
Recording and preserving interviews, often with communities whose history was never written down.
Volunteer processing hours
Local historical societies will take you at 16. It counts as experience later.
Basic coding
A little scripting to move and check thousands of files at once puts you ahead of most applicants.
Paleography
Reading old handwriting. Sounds obscure, and it is the difference between describing a collection and guessing at it.
Grant writing
Much of this field runs on grants. The person who can write one keeps their department funded.
The National Archives and Records Administration is the biggest archival employer in the country, and it hires through USAJOBS (the federal government's hiring site). Federal applications are their own skill: long resumes, specific keyword matching against the announcement, and a wait of months. Student and recent graduate openings go through the federal Pathways program, which is worth watching from your last year of school.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Open a box that has not been opened since it was donated. Sort the contents into a logical order, throw out the duplicates, the rusted paperclips and the mouse-chewed newspaper, and rehouse the rest in acid-free folders. Write a finding aid that describes what is there so a researcher can find one letter in forty boxes. Between all that, answer reference questions by email, sit with a researcher in the reading room, and fight with the storage budget. Some weeks it is quiet and repetitive. Then you find something nobody has read in a century.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are held by the National Archives and Records Administration and displayed in its rotunda in Washington. Archivists, not curators, are responsible for them.
Archivists call it appraisal. Only a small slice of any organization's paperwork is worth keeping forever, and choosing that slice is the most consequential thing an archivist does. Everything future historians can study is what somebody decided not to throw out.
Every modern president's papers end up in a presidential library run by the National Archives, staffed by federal archivists who process and release the records on a legal schedule.
A letter from 1850 is still readable. A word processor file from 1995 may need software nobody runs any more. That is why digital preservation archivists spend their careers migrating files to formats that will still open in fifty years.
Last checked September 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in United States dollars, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published pay scales. They vary by state, employer and experience. Tuition is for in-state students at public schools unless the card says otherwise.