CIfA has a vital role to play in improving and maintaining standards of archaeological work, and in enhancing the status of archaeologists. We believe that inadequate pay and conditions undermines the work we do in these areas and we are keen to ensure that the issue of pay is proactively addressed by the whole sector.
Salary benchmarking survey
To support the sector, CIfA has committed to undertaking regular salary benchmarking surveys to gather anonymised salary data for a range of job roles in archaeology in the UK. Salary benchmarking is widely used to compare salaries for different roles within a profession, track how salaries have changed over time or in relation to inflation or other benchmarks and compare salaries for roles in one profession against similar roles in equivalent professions.
For 2024, this was carried out using data from job adverts in JIST and on BAJR from 1 April 2023 to 31 March 2024. See the following document for details of the methodology:
Salary benchmarking survey 2025 - results
The benchmarking highlighted minimum, maximum and average salaries for a sample of job roles chosen to represent a range of sub-sectors and levels of seniority across the public, private and third sectors. Job roles were also mapped to CIfA accreditation grades to show minimum, maximum and average advertised salaries for roles requiring Practitioner (PCIfA), Associate (ACIfA) and Member (MCIfA) level competence.
The average advertised salaries for PCIfA, ACIfA and MCIfA level roles were also compared with equivalent roles from other sectors including construction, surveying, museums, ecology and environmental management.
The full report is available below:
More information about the salary benchmarking work can be found in the interim report issued in October 2024.