Whew friend,

We're almost there! Hope you are getting ready for some serious rest and recovery over the holiday season. I've already watched The Nutcracker, eaten a tourtière meat pie, decorated cookies, and started napping profusely.

When this edition's question about service design salaries came in from Glyn, I knew that to be able to answer it effectively we would need to do some data gathering. Salary data is a really important tool for people to benchmark their own salaries, negotiate with, and salary transparency is thought to be an important tool for pay equity.

So, Marc Fonteijn (of the Service Design Show and Service Design Jobs) and I collaborated on the first ever global service design salary survey. You can listen to our chat on the Service Design Show, where we talk about our approach to the minimal viable survey design, what surprised us in the data, and what we're planning for the next iteration.

Thank you Glyn, for spurring on the first ever global service design salary survey! Your question led to a global effort to collect data on service design salaries. Without further ado, let's get into it!

P.S. Be like Glyn! Submit a question - who knows what you might inspire!

Q: What is the service design salary wage / salary range worldwide?

For those of you who want to go straight to the source and play with the data, you're in luck - check out our interactive salary survey report. There are lots of interactive charts that you can customize to your specific location, experience level, and position (e.g. in-house, agency), to get the most relevant insights for you.

An interactive service design salary report. Our holiday gift to the service design community.

Our salary survey got over 1,000 responses from service designers in 53 countries. Let's take a look at some data points for top locations.

The United Kingdom had the highest number of respondents at 115
The United States came in second with 88 respondents
Canada was in fifth place with 68 respondents

So, what are the salary ranges in these countries? (Note: we asked for annual base salary in USD, and people could select from salary ranges. We also asked for years of formal service design experience.)

A chart comparing salaries and work experience. In the United Kingdom, the average annual salary for service designers is $82k USD, and service designers have an average of 5 years experience. In the US, the average annual salary is $124k USD, with an average of 4.5 years of work experience. Canadian service designers earn an average annual salary of $89k USD, with an average of 5 years of work experience.

Comparing average salaries and average years of service design experience in the US, UK and Canada. The size of the bubble represents the number of respondents from that country.

In the United Kingdom, the average annual salary for service designers is $82k USD, and service designers have an average of 5 years experience.
In the US, the average annual salary is $124k USD, with an average of 4.5 years of work experience.
Canadian service designers earn an average annual salary of $89k USD, with an average of 5 years of work experience.

From the survey, we can see that the average years of service design experience for respondents is fairly similar, however service designers in the US have higher annual salaries, on average.

Two Surprises in the Data

1. The Gender Pay Gap Lives :(

The gender pay gap rears its ugly head pretty clearly in many countries. (I knew this existed but seeing it repeat in a data set I was part of collecting somehow stung that bit more.) Even though the survey overall had about 60% women identified respondents (and this pattern of more women than men respondents held true in many countries), women are paid less on average.

A donut chart showing 61.4% respondents identified as women, 36.4% identified as men, and the remainder are split across a variety of gender identities including prefer not to say, gender non conforming, woman and two-spirit, woman and gender non-conforming, woman and transgender, others

Overall distribution of gender identity of all respondents from all countries.

The data for Canada show that men get paid on average 22% more than women.

Comparing average annual salary for men and women in Canada.

Interestingly, for Canada there doesn't appear to be a gender pay gap for respondents in agency, whereas the gap is even more prevalent for in-house service designers.

We should keep in mind that these are not huge sample sizes, the effect is striking nonetheless.

Average annual salary by gender for in-house service designers in Canada.

Average annual salary by gender for service designers working in agency or consulting in Canada.

It's also interesting to try to guess which countries have the least gender pay gap showing up in this data. Good job The Netherlands!!

2. Service Designers Get Paid Less!

Having service design in your title means you get paid less! In the US, 43% of respondents identified their title as being closest to 'Service Designer'.

Salary by title for the US shows us that service designers make an average of $105k USD per year, while the average for 'other' titles is $139k USD per year! (By the way, in the US, the most common titles were reported as 'Design Strategist' and 'Director of Design'.)

Salary by title for the US with 38 respondents with a service design title with $105K USD annual salary, and 50 respondents with 'other' in their title, with $139k USD annual salary. Most popular titles by count are service designer at 38, design strategist with 21, and director of design with 10

Salary by title for the US shows us that having 'service designer' in your title might mean you get paid less!

This effect was less prevalent for the United Kingdom, which has almost 70% of respondents identifying with a 'service designer' title.

We can hypothesize that this might be due to the UK market for service designers being more mature and developed, with more explicit service design roles, and a better understanding of the value the role can bring.

Average annual salary by job title for the UK. 79 respondents with a service design title with an annual average salary of $81k, and 36 respondents with 'other' titles with an average of $86k USD annual salary. The most popular titles are service designer with a 79 count, customer experience designer with 7, and design strategist with 7

In the United Kingdom, 'other' titles still get paid slightly more on average, but we see a much higher proportion of 'service design' titles in the data set.

There is so much more digging and discovery to be done in this data. We've had some good feedback about improvements we can make. Definitely curious to hear if this is useful, how you use it, and what you find interesting in the data!

Office Hours Shoutouts!

Shoutout to Aurelia, Miho, Stefanie, Sarah, Ariana, Julie and Tamara who joined me for the most recent office hours. Thank you for bringing your questions and curiosity! We talked about service design tools, career paths, the difference between UX research and service design, portfolio advice, getting your first job in service design, and gathering more contextual data during these remote times.

We also raised over $100 for Parkdale Community Foodbank! Thank you for signing up <3

Reciept for Parkdale Community Foodbank donation for $110

Yuss! Thank you <3

See you in 2021!

The Ask a Service Designer Newsletter has been a fun experiment, and it's still very much a prototype. So if there's something you'd like to see next year, or you have any feedback at all, please reach out and let me know.

Otherwise, please stay safe and well. It's been a long slog this year. Vaccines are being rolled out, and we have some pathways forward out of this thing. But we're not out of the woods yet. Let's persevere.

In service,
Linn