Decide what a museum collects, keeps and shows. A graduate degree, years of low pay, then a job very few people get.
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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
$63,420
Assistant curator
$40,470
Senior or chief curator
$107,140
The national median is $63,420 a year, and the bottom tenth start near $40,470. The spread is mostly about the size of the museum: a small county historical society and a major city art museum are not paying the same person the same money.
$40,000 to $50,000
Assistant curator, collections assistant or registrar at a mid-sized museum
Almost nobody walks into a curator title. You usually spend two to five years as a collections assistant, registrar or educator first, often on a grant funded contract.
$90,000 to $107,000 and up
Top tenth of the occupation, big city institutions
Above that you are into director and deputy director jobs, which are fundraising and management roles more than curatorial ones.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is a four year bachelor's degree at a public university at in-state rates of about $10,000 a year plus a two year master's at around $20,000 in total. The high end is the same shape at the dearer in-state rates, roughly $12,000 a year for the degree and $40,000 for the master's. A doctorate, which big art and science museums often want, is usually funded with a stipend and a teaching assistantship, so it adds years rather than tuition. The cost these figures hide is unpaid internships, which are the main reason this field skews toward people with family money.
Fill out the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) every year. Pell Grants cover undergraduate study and do not have to be repaid. Many museums are nonprofits or government bodies, so curators there can qualify for PSLF (Public Service Loan Forgiveness) after 10 years of payments.
Solid benefits at a large or university museum
Health insurance, a retirement plan, and often generous leave.
Research travel
Trips to other collections, auctions, digs and conferences, paid by the museum or by a grant.
Public service loan forgiveness
Nonprofit and government museums count as qualifying employers.
Very little overtime pay
Openings, donor events and install weeks run long and are usually just part of the salary.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Long, academic, and the bottleneck is experience rather than grades.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
History, art, biology, chemistry, a foreign language and strong writing. Volunteer at any local museum that will take you.
Bachelor's degree
4 years
In the subject you want to curate: art history, history, anthropology, biology, geology. Take museum studies courses if the school offers them.
Internships and entry jobs
1 to 3 years
Collections assistant, gallery attendant, education assistant, registrar. This is where you learn to actually handle objects and databases.
Master's degree
2 years
Museum studies, museology, art history or a science. The University of Washington runs a well known Master of Arts in Museology; many other public universities run similar programs.
Curator
2 to 5 more years
Assistant curator first, then associate, then curator. A doctorate is normal for art and science curators at large institutions.
History and art
The subject knowledge is the job.
English and writing
You write labels, catalogue essays, grant applications and condition reports all day.
A foreign language
Graduate programs in art history often require reading knowledge of one or two.
Science
Natural history and science museums curate specimens, and conservation work is chemistry.
There is no state license and no national exam. What stands in the way is competition. Museums accredit themselves through the AAM (American Alliance of Museums), and the field is small: openings for a curator job at a well known museum routinely draw hundreds of applications from people who all have a master's degree and several years of collections experience. If you want this job, be honest with yourself about whether you are prepared to spend years in low paid assistant roles, and be willing to move to wherever the opening is.
A few well known public and private programs. Dozens more exist, and the subject department matters as much as the museum studies label.
University of Washington
Master of Arts in Museology, run out of the Information School in Seattle.
George Washington University
Museum studies master's in Washington, close to the federal collections.
New York University
Museum studies and art history graduate programs in New York City.
Your own state's flagship public university
Usually the cheapest route, and in-state tuition is a real advantage in a field this badly paid.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Collections management software
PastPerfect and the other collection databases. Every museum runs one and somebody has to actually know it.
Digital collections and imaging
Photographing, scanning and publishing a collection online. Federal grant money goes here.
Conservation
A separate graduate track in chemistry and materials, and a genuinely scarce skill.
Grant writing
The Institute of Museum and Library Services and state humanities councils fund a lot of museum work, and the person who writes the grant is valuable.
Volunteering anywhere that has a collection
A county historical society counts. Start in high school.
Public speaking
Tours, donor talks, school groups and the occasional camera crew.
Photography
Small museums expect the curator to shoot the object record.
Patience with paperwork
Loan agreements, accession records and insurance forms are a large part of the week.
Most of the roughly 35,000 museums in the United States are small, and about a fifth of them are in rural areas. At a small museum the curator is also the registrar, the educator, the grant writer and the person who fixes the dehumidifier. The pay is lower and the title arrives much sooner. Plenty of people take one of these jobs at 26, learn every part of the work in three years, and use it to move to a bigger institution later.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Morning in the collections store checking condition on objects going out on loan, then two hours writing labels for a show that opens in four months. Lunch at your desk answering a researcher's email about an object nobody has looked at since 1974. Afternoon is a meeting with the exhibit designer, a call with a donor who wants to give the museum something it does not want, and an hour on a grant application. Install weeks are entirely different: long days on your feet in a gallery with an art handler and a level.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
The American Alliance of Museums counts about 35,000 museums across the United States, supporting roughly 726,000 jobs and contributing around $50 billion a year to the economy. Most of them are small.
Large museums typically show only a small fraction of what they own. The rest sits in climate controlled storage, catalogued and checked, which is why collections work is most of the job and gallery work is the visible part.
When a museum accessions an object it commits to storing, insuring and conserving it indefinitely. That is why curators turn down donations that sound generous, and why deaccessioning, the act of removing something from a collection, is governed by strict professional rules.
The IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) is a federal agency that awards grants to museums, libraries and archives in all 50 states and the territories. A surprising share of exhibitions and digitization projects run on that money.
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.