What Society Values

Social work has always been considered a "low paying profession". In the beginning, it wasn't a profession at all. Women with big hearts and tons of empathy reached out to help society's unfortunates, and that image of the social work profession has persisted to this day. With the Industrial Revolution, immigrants flowed into the U.S. and lived in dire poverty until they were assimilated into the economy of the 20th century. Cheek by jowl with wealthier neighbors, their poverty was uncomfortably visible in major American cities, and social work as a paid profession began to emerge. By the 1950s, social workers were required to be college level educated and finally, by the 1970s, required an advanced degree to rise to the top of their profession. Over the 20th century, social work had journeyed from well-meaning volunteers to highly educated professionals without society taking notice. As a result, proper pay has always lagged the professional status of social work giving social work the reputation of a comparatively "low paying profession".

Social Worker Pay

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary for social workers in 2023 was $58,380 per year or $28.07 per hour. In contrast, a Smart-Asset analysis estimates that an individual would need to make $96,500 annually to live in sustainable comfort in a major US city. Even if you’re making $70,000 coming out of graduate school, it’s not sufficient in terms of the student debt load, in terms of the cost of living, in terms of paying for licensure, and everything that comes with it.

Causes of this Pay Lag

Sue Coyle, MSW, in her recent article It's Time to Talk About Money, quotes social workers on why social worker pay has not kept pace.

• “I don’t think you can easily separate them out: gender discrimination, the way racism operates in our labor market, the devaluation of care work, the general devaluation of people who need care. All those things" (tend to cause social worker pay to lag inflation).
• “I think our profession has a long history of its visible members not relying on it for the majority of their family income. Many prominent early social workers were women from wealthy families in an era when women were not expected to earn their keep.”
• “In our field, we are expected to do a lot of unpaid work—not just students but professionals,” says Alejandra Luis, MSW, a part of the national leadership team for Payment for Placements and a recent MSW graduate in Georgia.
• “Unpaid internships, with the expectation that students will complete 1,200 hours per school year, for example, are exhausting for MSW students and limit the individuals who are able to complete the program.”
• "The lack of pay in school can influence the salaries social workers receive once they graduate as well as the opportunities they may have, first and foremost because some positions are being filled by the unpaid interns," according to Elise Colquitt, MSW.
• “Outside of internships, social workers often put in more hours than expected and take on additional tasks in an attempt to serve their clients better. However, it’s rare for these extras to be paid or even recognized.”
• “Beyond that, the United States often does not recognize the value of supporting and uplifting the communities struggling most for a variety of reasons and, thus, funding for programs within those communities is limited by the funders.”

Results of this Pay Lag

Social workers themselves see dire implications resulting from this lag in competitive pay.

• "If we don’t get better paying positions, we’re going to return to a profession where it’s not a viable career for people, and that would be to the detriment of the profession. We also run the risk of people leaving social work and trying to do the things they would have done as social workers with a different career training.”
• Alejandra Luis, MSW adds, “I see our profession going away if it doesn’t fix its issues. The social work profession is always worried about how are we comparing to mental health and counseling? How are we comparing to MEds? How are we comparing to clinical psychology? These are programs where the rate of return of the degrees is incredibly high.”
• “The fact that students are no longer seeing the appeal for this degree is telling. Class sizes are decreasing. Our retention rates are down,” she continues. “It’s scary to think about because there are so many people out there doing incredible work as social workers, doing so many things that are changing their communities. But once those people are gone, there’s nobody who is going to fill their shoes.”

If you look at social work pay as these professionals do, you realize that if we don’t wake up our society may be on the verge of a social crisis.