Critical Services, High Growth, Low Wages

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.

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 CUNY ISLG to conduct an analysis to better comprehend the breadth of the State’s human services landscape, understand the prevailing average wages of nonprofit employees that provide client-contact human services contracted by the State, and explore whether human services workers experienced real wage gains over time.

A second analysis then measured the gap between human services wages and the cost of living in New York.

This report lays out what we found from both analyses.