
New York’s human services sector is crucial to the State’s social fabric, with hundreds of thousands of people across the state relying on these public services. Despite this importance, the staff who provide them consistently make less than the cost of living, straining the pipeline of people entering and staying in these fields.
CUNY ISLG has conducted an in-depth analysis to better understand the breadth of the state’s human services landscape and their wages, as well as quantify the need for investment in it, to lay out a roadmap to a more robust, sustainable, and effective public sector.
New York’s human services sector is crucial to its social fabric. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people across the state rely on these public services, whether it be childcare, homelessness prevention, mental healthcare, or services for older adults. These services seek to provide all New Yorkers—no matter their income, zip code, or background—with the tools and support to lead healthy, safe, financially stable lives.
With the growing affordability crisis and lingering socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, need for these resources have grown exponentially in recent years; to fill this demand, services funded by state and local governments are increasingly contracted out to nonprofit organizations, amounting to as much as $9 billion a year in New York City alone. Despite the importance of these services, wages in the human services sector lag behind the cost of living in New York, straining the pipeline of people entering and staying in these careers, and forcing many workers to experience the same financial and wellbeing strains as the people they serve.
New York’s human services sector is crucial to the state’s social fabric. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people across the state rely on these public services, whether it be childcare, homelessness prevention, mental healthcare, or services for older adults. These services seek to provide all New Yorkers—no matter their income, zip code, or background—with the tools and support to lead healthy, safe, financially stable lives.
With the growing affordability crisis and lingering socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, need for these resources have grown exponentially in recent years; to fill this demand, services funded by state and local governments are increasingly contracted out to nonprofit organizations, amounting to as much as $9 billion a year in New York City alone. Despite the importance of these services, wages in the human services sector lag behind the cost of living in New York, straining the pipeline of people entering and staying in these careers, and forcing many workers to experience the same financial and wellbeing strains as the people they serve.
Notably, recent research has shown that workers employed by nonprofit organizations contracted by the government earn significantly lower wages than their government-employed peers—and that these wages have not kept up with cost of living. In other words, by privatizing public services, the nonprofit human services workforce faces low wages despite providing skilled and critical services.
In 2024, a group of New York-based human service workers, executives, advocates, and former government leaders began Bring Up Minimum Pay (BUMP), an anti-poverty campaign that promotes wages that reflect the true cost of living for New York human services workers. To provide data and analysis, BUMP approached the Institute for State & Local Governance at the City University of New York (CUNY ISLG) to quantify the need for investment in the human services workforce, and in future work, measure the benefits of paying these staff a wage that accounts for the true cost of living.
As part of this project, CUNY ISLG sought to better understand the breadth of the state’s human services landscape and the prevailing wages of those nonprofit employees that provide human services contracted by the State. CUNY ISLG used publicly available data to paint a high-level picture of the human services industry across the state, estimate average wages for the workforce, and explore whether human services workers experienced real wage gains over time. Additionally, the analysis measured the gap between human services wages and the cost of living in New York.
The findings from this labor market analysis, presented in this brief, show that as human services employment doubled in New York over the past two decades, real wages fell, especially for the lowest paid workers. Not surprisingly then, the analysis finds that the majority of human services workers earn below the cost of living and have higher rates of public benefit utilization and lower rates of health insurance than other New Yorkers.
More specifically, this analysis found:
- Human services employment has a large footprint across the state. 1 in 9 New York employees work in a human services-related industry. Human services- related employment has nearly doubled to almost a million since 2000.
- Real wages for human services workers have stagnated over the past two decades. Workers in human services-related industries earned about $40,000 in 2023 compared to the statewide average of $90,000—up about 3 percent versus 12 percent, respectively, since 2000. Importantly, real wages for Home Health Care Services, the largest human services industry, declined by as much as 6 percent since before the pandemic.
- Women of color, many of whom are immigrants, make up the vast majority of the human services workforce. Home health aides, nursing assistants, and childcare workers—the occupations that make up the majority of the sector and are mostly held by women of color—receive low wages and, as a result, experience higher rates of poverty and public benefit utilization than other individuals across New York.
- More than half of human services workers across New York State earn wages that are below the cost of living. Over 80 percent of human services worker households with children earn below the cost of living.
- Human services workers are underpaid by as much as $20,000 per worker each year. The cost of living for a single adult New Yorker is about $60,000 per worker per year–or about $27-$29/hour on a full-time basis. This is much higher than the average annual wage of about $40,000 for workers in a human services-related industry.
- Wages below the cost of living are widespread for the human services workforce throughout New York. Upstate New York is more affordable relative to the New York City area but generally there is still a gap between the cost of living and the wages human services workers earn throughout the state.
The report that follows first defines the “human services workforce” for the purposes of this analysis. Second, broad industry findings are presented that speak to the size, scale, and wages of human services-related industries in New York. Third, the report details the demographic and economic characteristics of the human services workforce in the state. Lastly, the report includes results from a wage-gap analysis that focuses on comparing the cost of living in the state to wages earned by the human services workforce. This brief also includes an appendix with detailed data and methodology notes.
There is no single or definitive definition of the human services workforce. The National Organization of Human Services (NOHS) describes human services as the prevention and remediation of problems experienced by individuals receiving social services. Services can include and are not limited to community mental health and substance abuse services; alternatives to incarceration and reentry services; food and nutrition assistance; family, child, and youth services; housing and shelter services; employment and workforce services; services for older adults; legal and victim assistance; and services for individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities. Human services are provided in a number of settings, such as via social service agencies or community-based, residential, or institutional settings.
This analysis relies on publicly available data sources, including data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), namely, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) and the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), as well as the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS). Within these data sources there is no clearly delineated "human services" employment category. Therefore, CUNY ISLG flagged individual industries and occupations as being human services related (see Appendix for a breakdown of specific industries and occupations). For example, the industry group "Home Health Care Services” was considered human services-related.
Over 800,000 people worked in a client-facing human services occupation across New York State in 2023.It is also important to note that this analysis considers trends for human services industries and human services occupations, respectively. Industry-level analysis allows for an exploration of broad sector trends and includes data on private employmenti (which includes nonprofit organizations and excludes government employment), including, for example, Home Health Care Services, Services for the Elderly and Disabled, and Child Day Care Services. Nearly a million people across New York are privately employed by a human-services related industry. Occupation-level data, in turn, allow for deeper insight into specific human services related occupations, including home health aides, nursing assistants, and childcare workers. Over 800,000 people worked in a client-facing human services occupation across New York State in 2023. The occupation data are not broken down by employer type (at least at state level) – so the occupation-level trends in this analysis, unless otherwise noted, represent averages across both private (including nonprofit) and government workers. Lastly, because this analysis relies on publicly available data, it is limited to the industry and occupation categories and definitions employed by the BLS and the Census Bureau. For a full list of industries and occupations included in CUNY ISLG’s human services definition, see the appendix.

Not only are wages for human services-related industries much lower than the state average, Home Health Care Services—the industry with the most employment growth—saw real wages decline by 10 percent since 2000

In other words, Home Health Aides or Childcare Workers will likely never earn higher wages in those occupations, despite advancing level of experience and skill.

The benefits of increasing wages are clear: higher wages would help retain skilled workers, attract new talent, and ultimately improve the quality and sustainability of services for New Yorkers.
Human services workers are crucial to the wellbeing of all New Yorkers, offering a wide range of services that support the most vulnerable members of community, including the elderly, people with disabilities, and those facing mental health and substance use challenges. Human services workers provide direct care, connect individuals to resources, and strengthen communities. Despite this crucial, and often demanding, job, the majority of these workers earn less than the cost of living. The lowest paid human services occupations—home health aides, nursing assistants, and childcare workers—are underpaid by as much as $20,000 annually per employee, across hundreds of thousands of employees.
Closing this gap is costly. But the benefits of increasing wages are clear: higher wages would help retain skilled workers, attract new talent, and ultimately improve the quality and sustainability of services for New Yorkers. Forthcoming analyses from CUNY ISLG will provide deeper insight into how increasing wages for the human services workforce would impact individuals, their communities, and government—that is, comparing the cost of increasing wages against savings to government, and the benefits accrued to individuals and their communities because of higher incomes. Stay tuned for these and other analyses on how New York and other states can better support the people and services that keep our communities running.
This report is the culmination of many important partnerships. First and foremost, we want to acknowledge the Bring Up Minimum Pay (BUMP) campaign for funding this important work. This project would not be possible without their commitment to using data to quantify the need for investment in the human services workforce and the benefits of paying these workers a true cost of living.
We are thankful for our CUNY ISLG colleagues who contributed at every stage; this report would have been impossible without guidance from Senior Fellow Dean Fuleihan, and editing, design, and release support from our communications staff, Carla Sinclair and Alisa Orlowsky.
Last but not least, we thank Design for Progress and its co-founders Paragini Amin and Chris Edley as well as their partners at Thought Driven Development for their tireless creativity and help with the design of the static and interactive template used for this report.