Is Administrative & Office Support a Good Job Market in Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX?

Executive Verdict

Market rating: competitive | Confidence: Medium

Dallas-Fort Worth is still a large office-support market, with office and administrative support making up 12.7% of regional employment versus 11.8% nationally, and the local sample showing more than 2,000 postings across more than 750 companies over the last 90 days.[27][19] But it is not an easy market: metro unemployment was 4.7% in June 2026 and up 17.5000% year over year, while Texas administrative-and-office-support postings were down 10.8% year over year and employment in the occupation was essentially flat statewide.[17][8][13] That adds up to a market with real openings, but weaker odds for generic applicants than the posting volume alone suggests.

Best positioned: The best odds go to applicants who can show Microsoft 365 fluency, customer-facing experience, and ownership of permits, compliance, scheduling, or operational coordination rather than only generic clerical tasks.[29][26][15]

Main caution: Do not assume remote admin work is common here; about 95% of sampled postings were on-site, with only about 5% hybrid and about 5% remote.[7]

What Changed Recently

• Dallas job seekers are facing a looser metro labor market than a year ago: unemployment was 4.7% in June 2026 and up 17.5000% year over year, while metro employment was down -0.3533% year over year.[17][18]: More people are competing for openings, so employers can screen harder for recent admin experience and role-specific fit.
• Texas office-support demand cooled even as the broader state market held up: administrative and office support postings were down 10.8% year over year and employment in the occupation was essentially flat, while Texas postings across all occupations were up 1.2% year over year.[8][13]: Generic admin applicants are competing in a category that is lagging the broader Texas job market.
• Openings still exist at scale in Dallas-Fort Worth: the local sample saw more than 2,000 postings across more than 750 companies over the last 90 days, with hiring fragmented across employers rather than dominated by one firm.[19][20]: You do not need one dream-employer list; you need a broad, fast application process across many companies.
• Recent local listings leaned toward operations-linked admin work, including permitting and compliance coordination at NG Companies, contract-to-hire hiring at Addison Group, multiple support roles at Dallas College, and operational team support at American Airlines.[15][4][14][16]: The better openings are often not pure receptionist jobs; they sit inside operations, education, and large service organizations.
• Nationally, the backdrop is steady but cautious: the June 2026 openings rate was 4.4%, but the quits rate was 2.0% and down 4.7619% year over year.[11][12]: Expect employers to move more deliberately and to favor candidates who can be productive quickly.

What This Means for You

Entry-Level Candidates

Difficulty: Moderate to hard: there are lots of junior openings, but many applicants chase the same general admin roles.

Best target: On-site administrative assistant, front desk, campus support, and service-site coordinator jobs where customer flow, scheduling, and order handling matter.

Biggest mistake: Applying as a generic office professional without showing concrete tasks like calendar ownership, records accuracy, Excel trackers, or customer issue resolution.

Next step: Rewrite your resume around 6-8 repeatable office tasks and apply in daily batches to large local employers, colleges, and multi-site operators.

Mid-Career Candidates

Difficulty: Competitive: better pay exists, but employers want proof that you can own a function, not just assist.

Best target: Executive-support, office-manager, operations-coordinator, and compliance-heavy admin roles.

Biggest mistake: Staying too general and hiding domain knowledge in construction, education, travel, healthcare front office, or insurance.

Next step: Build a targeted resume version for one domain and show process improvement, vendor coordination, travel, reporting, or compliance outcomes.

Career Switchers

Difficulty: Hard unless you can bridge from customer service, hospitality, retail, or operations support.

Best target: Administrative roles close to your prior industry, especially site coordination, scheduling, dispatch-adjacent, or customer-facing office roles.

Biggest mistake: Trying to jump straight into executive assistant openings without evidence of calendar management, discretion, and stakeholder support.

Next step: Use a contract-to-hire or coordinator role as the bridge and add one short proof project such as an SOP, scheduling template, or Excel tracker.

Salary Reality

stable pay slow advancement

The cleanest local benchmark is O*NET's wage data for secretaries and administrative assistants excluding legal, medical, and executive roles: $46,610 median in Dallas-Fort Worth, with a $37,410 to $53,860 middle band and a $62,380 90th percentile.[1] Broader local posting samples point a bit higher, with annual ranges centered on about $50k to $65k and hourly roles centered on about $16 to $19 per hour, while one Fort Worth contract-to-hire posting advertised $31-$36 per hour for a more experienced administrative assistant.[2][3][4]

Local posted pay looks higher than the direct wage benchmark because postings mix in stronger-paying executive assistant and office manager paths alongside generalist admin roles.[5][1][2]

The catch is access: about 85% of sampled openings are entry level, about 95% are on-site, and Texas occupation-specific postings are down 10.8% year over year.[6][7][8]

Best-paying path: The strongest pay appears to sit in executive assistant and office manager tracks, plus occasional experienced contract roles.[5][4]

Caution: Do not treat the top of posted ranges as typical; the direct local 90th percentile for the anchor occupation is $62,380, and proxy posting bands blend very different sub-roles.[1][2]

Where the Opportunities Are Concentrated

Real volume looks less like classic downtown executive support and more like service-heavy, multi-site admin work. In the local sample, food and beverage accounts for about 50% of postings, healthcare about 15%, hospitality about 10%, retail about 10%, and insurance about 5%.[24] About 40% of sampled postings come from large employers and about 20% from enterprise employers, while hiring is fragmented overall.[25][20] That helps explain why the skill mix is more operational than purely clerical: customer service appears in about 25% of sampled postings, while order processing, inventory management, and computer literacy each show up in about 20% of the sample.[26] Recent named openings reinforce that pattern, including multiple administrative support roles at Dallas College, a permitting/compliance-focused administrative assistant at NG Companies, and an Administrative Assistant I role inside American Airlines' Inflight Innovation and Delivery team.[14][15][16] For job seekers, the practical takeaway is that a generic admin search is too broad. The better strategy is to pick a lane—service-site support, education administration, or operations-linked coordination—and tailor your resume to that environment.

• Service-site and front-office admin (high): The biggest visible volume sits in food and beverage, healthcare, hospitality, and retail, where customer service, order processing, and site support matter as much as clerical accuracy.[24][26]
• Operations-linked administrative support (moderate): Recent DFW examples include permitting, compliance, operational coordination, and inflight delivery support rather than standalone desk coverage.[15][16]
• Education and campus administration (moderate): Dallas College showed multiple recent administrative support openings, including executive assistant, senior administrative assistant, and administrative assistant II roles.[14]
• Classic executive support (limited): This path appears to hold the strongest pay, but it is a smaller slice of the market and usually requires stronger discretion, calendar management, and stakeholder support.[5]

Where to focus: Prioritize large, on-site employers where admin work supports operations, scheduling, compliance, or customer flow rather than relying on broad remote-admin searches.

Skills and Credentials Worth Pursuing

• Microsoft 365 (table stakes): Advanced Microsoft 365 remains a core admin tool set, and local postings still ask for computer literacy in about 20% of the sample.[29][26]
• Teams and Zoom coordination (table stakes): Employers still expect fluency with communication platforms such as Teams and Zoom for internal coordination, scheduling, and handoffs.[29]
• Customer service and front-desk handling (table stakes): Local demand is pulled toward service-heavy employers, with customer service in about 25% of sampled postings and the industry mix led by food and beverage, healthcare, hospitality, and retail.[26][24]
• Order processing and inventory-aware admin work (differentiator): Order processing and inventory management each appear in about 20% of sampled postings, which suggests many admin jobs sit close to site operations rather than pure clerical support.[26]
• Permitting, compliance, and operational coordination (differentiator): Recent Dallas-Fort Worth hiring included an administrative assistant role centered on permitting, compliance, and operational coordination, a strong sign that process ownership beats generic clerical experience.[15]
• AI assistants and document automation (premium): Admin tool stacks now include Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant, Zapier + AI Actions, and Otter.ai, and applied AI/data experience can command up to 25% higher pay in some markets.[30][29]
• Background-check readiness (table stakes): Formal certifications are rarely the gate in this category, but the most common explicit requirement in the local sample is a background check, even if it appears in less than 5% of postings.[31]

Adjacent Roles to Consider

• Patient Access Representative (both): Dallas listings included a Flex Phlebotomist / Administrative Assistant role, showing demand for blended patient-facing admin support rather than pure clerical work.[14]
• Operations Coordinator (both): Local postings at NG Companies and American Airlines place admin support inside permitting, compliance, delivery, and operational teams rather than standalone office desks.[15][16]
• Permit or Compliance Coordinator (pivot): A recent DFW administrative assistant opening was explicitly built around permitting and compliance, which is a natural step out of general admin work.[15]
• Airline Operations Support Coordinator (bridge): American Airlines advertised an Administrative Assistant I role tied to Inflight Innovation and Delivery, which is closer to business operations support than front-desk administration.[16]

30 / 60 / 90-Day Plan

First 30 Days

• Split your search into four saved-title buckets: administrative assistant, front desk or customer-facing office support, campus administration, and operations coordinator.
• Rewrite your resume so every bullet shows an office output: calendars managed, documents processed, invoices tracked, phones handled, schedules built, customer issues resolved, or reports maintained.
• Create one proof-of-work page with an Excel tracker, a meeting agenda template, a document naming system, and a short SOP you wrote yourself.
• Set a commute-based search radius and favor on-site openings at large local employers instead of waiting for remote admin jobs.

Days 31-60

• Add one concrete workflow skill that changes your fit immediately: advanced Excel, Microsoft 365 admin features, Teams meeting logistics, or Adobe PDF workflow automation.
• Build a domain version of your resume for one lane only: education, healthcare front office, airline or travel operations, insurance support, or permitting and compliance.
• Target contract-to-hire and recruiter-led openings where speed matters, then follow up with a short note that highlights your exact task match.
• Track response rates by title family so you can stop wasting applications on the weakest-converting role types.

Days 61-90

• If generic admin response stays weak, pivot to an adjacent lane such as patient access, operations coordination, or permit and compliance support.
• Use short-term assignments, campus roles, or multi-site office jobs to collect current references and recent-office experience.
• Package one stronger story around ownership, not assistance: a process you improved, a schedule you stabilized, or an error rate you reduced.
• When interviews appear, negotiate title and growth path first, because pay movement is often limited unless the role includes domain ownership.

Methodology and Confidence

This July 2026 report was generated on August 10, 2026. Latest direct national data: September 2026. Latest direct Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX data: August 2026.

Confidence: Overall confidence: Medium. Local evidence is solid, but some conclusions still rely on proxy hiring signals and category-level inference.

Limitations

• The freshest Dallas-Fort Worth labor-market context in this report is from June 2026, but the cleanest local occupation wage benchmarks for administrative assistants come from May 2025 and the broader office-support wage benchmark comes from May 2024, so pay may have shifted since those measures were collected.[17][1][27]
• Some local monthly government figures are preliminary and can be revised, so the recent year-over-year rise in unemployment and slight dip in employment should be read as a current signal, not a final settled number.[17][18]
• This category is broader than any one title: the report anchors wages to secretaries and administrative assistants, while the live posting mix also includes front-desk, customer-facing, and operations-linked roles that may pay and hire differently.[1][26][15][16]
• The Callings.ai job database is a partial, deduplicated sample of online postings, so direction of demand, leading employer names, and skill patterns are more reliable than exact counts or exact shares.
• Where metro-level occupation trend data was not available, Texas-wide occupation figures were used as a proxy, so Dallas-Fort Worth may be somewhat stronger or weaker than the state pattern.[13][8]

References

1. Onetonline. Texas Wages: 43-6014.00 - Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Except Legal, Medical, and Executive · 2026-08 · onetonline.org
2. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
3. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
4. Addisongroup. Administrative Assistant Job » Apply Today | Addison Group · 2026-08 · addisongroup.com
5. Callings. Office Support Jobs in Dallas: June 2026 Outlook | Callings.ai · 2026-08 · callings.ai
6. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
7. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
8. Reveliolabs. Job Openings — Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) · 2026-07 · reveliolabs.com
9. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-07 · data.bls.gov
10. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-04 · data.bls.gov
11. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-06 · data.bls.gov
12. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-06 · data.bls.gov
13. Reveliolabs. Employment — Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) · 2026-07 · reveliolabs.com
14. Donewithwork. Administrative Assistant Jobs in Dallas, TX — 11+ Jobs | DoneWithWork · 2026-08 · donewithwork.com
15. Recruiting. NG Companies - Administrative Assistant · 2026-08 · recruiting.paylocity.com
16. Jobs. Administrative Jobs in Dallas Aug 2026. · 2026-08 · jobs.digitalhire.com
17. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-06 · data.bls.gov
18. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-06 · data.bls.gov
19. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
20. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
21. Chron. Client Challenge · 2026-07 · chron.com
22. Reveliolabs. Mass-layoff Notices — Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) · 2026-07 · reveliolabs.com
23. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Industry and occupational employment projections overview and highlights, 2024–34 : Monthly Labor Review : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · 2026-05 · bls.gov
24. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
25. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
26. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
27. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Employment and Wages in Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington — May 2024 · 2025-06 · bls.gov
28. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
29. Frontlinesourcegroup. Top Skills Administrative Professionals Need in 2026 · 2025-10 · frontlinesourcegroup.com
30. Administrativetask. Best AI Tools for Administrative Tasks in 2026: Automate Your Back Office | Administrative Task · 2026-06 · administrativetask.com
31. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai

Live Openings in This Market

This report is published monthly; its companion page tracks the active Administrative & Office Support openings in Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX from the live Callings.ai job index. Browse current Administrative & Office Support openings in Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX.