Is Administrative & Office Support a Good Job Market in Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI?

Executive Verdict

Market rating: competitive | Confidence: High

This is still a large local occupation group, with 214,110 office and administrative support jobs in Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington in May 2025, equal to 11.0% of local employment.[19] But landing a role is not especially easy right now: metro unemployment was 4.7% in August 2026, and Minnesota administrative and office support postings were down 2.2% year over year in September while statewide employment in the occupation was essentially flat.[27][3][5] The market is active rather than dead, with more than 500 postings across more than 250 companies in the last 90 days, but it looks like a replacement-hiring market, not a breakout-growth market.[32]

Best positioned: Candidates with recent on-site administrative experience and strong customer service, Microsoft Office, data entry, and computer proficiency skills have the best odds, especially in customer-facing coordinator and front-desk roles.[15][14]

Main caution: Do not assume remote flexibility or executive-assistant pay represents the whole market: about 90% of local postings are on-site, less than 5% are remote, and receptionist pay sits far below executive-assistant averages.[14][19]

What Changed Recently

• Local labor conditions got softer. Minneapolis-St. Paul unemployment reached 4.7% in August 2026, up 17.5% year over year, and the metro unemployment level rose 16.1079%.[27][28]: That usually means more applicants per opening, especially for generalist administrative jobs that do not require specialized support experience.
• The broader local office economy is still adding jobs. Minneapolis-St. Paul professional and business services employment rose 1.7696% year over year in August 2026, and total metro nonfarm employment rose 1.3895%.[9][29]: There is still underlying employer activity, but it is not automatically translating into fast growth for this occupation group.
• Statewide signals for the occupation turned more selective than the broader local economy. Minnesota administrative and office support employment was essentially flat year over year in September 2026, while active postings were down 2.2% year over year.[5][3]: Expect openings, but plan for slower response times and more emphasis on exact fit than on trainability.
• Pay pressure is no longer clearly outrunning inflation. U.S. CPI was up 3.0% year over year in August 2026, and average hourly earnings for total private workers were also up about 3.0% in September 2026.[10][11]: For Minneapolis admin job seekers, that means negotiating leverage is strongest when you bring a specialty such as executive support, project coordination, or automation skills rather than relying on the market to bid pay up on its own.
• The long-run outlook became less forgiving for routine office roles. The BLS said AI-related productivity gains are expected to limit demand for several office-support occupations, and nonmedical secretaries and administrative assistants are among occupations expected to have declining or little-changed employment over 2024-2034.[6][4]: The safest path is to position yourself as a workflow, coordination, and problem-solving hire, not just a task-processing hire.

What This Means for You

Entry-Level Candidates

Difficulty: Moderate to high. Entry openings exist, but they attract a lot of general applicants.

Best target: Target on-site front-desk, coordinator, and service-admin roles in restaurants, wellness and fitness, retail, and nonclinical healthcare settings, which were the most active local segments in the posting sample.[16]

Biggest mistake: Applying with a generic resume that says only 'organized' and 'detail-oriented' instead of showing data-entry speed, scheduling, customer handling, and Office proficiency.

Next step: Build one resume version for front-desk/customer-facing work and a second for back-office coordination, then apply to both tracks in parallel.

Mid-Career Candidates

Difficulty: Moderate. You can stand out, but only if your background clearly matches the employer's operating environment.

Best target: Aim for executive assistant, office manager, and coordination-heavy roles where calendaring, document flow, vendor handling, or cross-team support matter more than pure clerical output.[19][17]

Biggest mistake: Chasing only title prestige while ignoring sector fit; multi-site service employers and healthcare front offices may move faster than traditional corporate assistant searches.

Next step: Rewrite your resume around outcomes such as executive support, meeting logistics, office systems, and process improvement instead of listing duties.

Career Switchers

Difficulty: High unless you can prove customer-facing operations discipline.

Best target: Move first into receptionist, coordinator, dispatcher, or client-facing administrative roles that reward customer service and computer proficiency, both of which show up prominently in local postings.[15]

Biggest mistake: Presenting unrelated experience without translating it into scheduling, record accuracy, document handling, and stakeholder communication.

Next step: Create a short portfolio of admin tasks you can already do well: calendar blocks, spreadsheet cleanup, meeting notes, call handling scripts, and basic office workflows.

Salary Reality

stable pay slow advancement

Government wage data shows a 2025 metro annual mean of $56,150, a median of $52,920, a 25th percentile of $45,550, and a 75th percentile of $63,410 for the occupation group.[20][18][21][22] The local mean hourly wage was $27.00 in May 2025.[19] As directional current-market support, posted salary ranges in the local sample centered on about $51k to $70k, hourly-paid postings centered on about $18 to $21 / hour, and Revelio Public Labor Statistics put the mean offered salary on new Minnesota openings at about $53,231 in September 2026 (n=1,027).[23][24][25]

Minneapolis pays somewhat above the national office-support average: the metro mean hourly wage was $2.21 above the national mean in May 2025.[19] That is a real advantage, but it still points to a middle-income office market, not a high-end one.

The spread by subrole is wide. Executive secretaries and executive administrative assistants averaged $81,370, general office clerks averaged $50,800, administrative assistants averaged $54,740, and receptionists averaged $39,450 in May 2025.[19] So the headline average can overstate what broadly accessible roles pay.

Best-paying path: The strongest pay tends to sit in executive support and higher-trust coordination roles. Executive assistants averaged $81,370 locally, above the occupation group's 90th-percentile wage of $78,370.[19][26]

Caution: Do not overread the top end. The metro had 6,150 executive assistants versus 19,180 administrative assistants and 8,780 receptionists, so premium pay is concentrated in a smaller slice of the market.[19]

Where the Opportunities Are Concentrated

Real opportunities are not spread evenly across every kind of office job. In the local posting sample, the most-active industries were restaurants at about 20%, wellness and fitness services at about 15%, hospitals and health care at about 15%, and retail at about 15%.[16] That points to a market tilted toward front-desk, scheduling, dispatch, coordinator, and customer-facing administrative work rather than a market dominated by classic downtown corporate assistant roles. The employer base is broad rather than concentrated, with fragmented hiring across employers in the sample, and about 25% of postings coming from large employers.[2][31] At the same time, the work is overwhelmingly in person and early-career: about 90% of postings were on-site, about 10% hybrid, less than 5% remote, and about 75% were entry level.[14][13] That combination makes the market more accessible than a pure executive-support market, but it also makes it more crowded.

• Multi-site consumer services (high): Restaurants, fitness, and retail account for a large share of visible local demand, making them the best volume target for front-desk, coordinator, and customer-facing admin work.[16]
• Nonclinical healthcare front office (moderate): Hospitals and health care are active in the local sample, but the safer fit inside this category is reception, scheduling, and office coordination rather than medical records or billing work.[16]
• Executive support and office leadership (moderate): These roles pay better, but they are fewer and usually require proof of executive calendaring, document management, prioritization, and stakeholder handling.[19][17]
• Remote administrative work (limited): Remote openings are a small slice of the market, with less than 5% of local postings marked remote.[14]

Where to focus: Focus first on on-site coordinator, receptionist, and service-admin roles at multi-location employers, then layer in higher-paying executive-support roles if your background already matches them.

Skills and Credentials Worth Pursuing

• Microsoft Office / Office Suite (table stakes): Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office Suite were among the most-requested skills in local postings, which makes basic fluency a baseline filter rather than a differentiator.[15]
• Data entry accuracy (table stakes): Data entry appeared among the most-requested local skills, signaling that employers still screen hard for speed and accuracy in routine administrative workflows.[15]
• Customer service (table stakes): Customer service was one of the most-requested skills in local postings, which fits a market concentrated in front-desk and service-adjacent employers.[15][16]
• Microsoft Excel (differentiator): Excel appears less often than general Office skills in local postings, which is exactly why it can help separate you from generalist applicants.[15]
• Scheduling and executive support (differentiator): Robert Half identified scheduling and executive support as relevant differentiators, and the best-paying local subrole is executive assistant work.[17][19]
• Document management and project coordination (differentiator): Document management and project coordination were identified as differentiating administrative capabilities, which matters in a market where routine clerical work is easier to substitute.[17][6]
• Workflow automation and AI literacy (premium): Robert Half said AI literacy and comfort with automation are becoming important, and 83% of administrative and customer support leaders said they would offer higher pay for specialized or technology-enabled skills.[17][30] The BLS also expects AI-related productivity gains to limit demand in some office-support occupations, so automation fluency is becoming a defense as well as an advantage.[6]

Adjacent Roles to Consider

• HR Coordinator (both): It uses scheduling, document handling, onboarding support, and stakeholder communication that many admins already do.
• Project Coordinator (both): It builds directly on meeting logistics, follow-up discipline, status tracking, and cross-team support.
• Sales Coordinator / Sales Operations Assistant (both): Administrative candidates often already handle CRM updates, quote support, scheduling, and customer communication.
• Customer Success Coordinator (bridge): This is a good bridge for candidates whose strongest admin asset is customer-facing problem solving rather than executive support.

30 / 60 / 90-Day Plan

First 30 Days

• Create two resume versions: one for front-desk/customer-facing work and one for coordinator/executive-support work.
• Add proof points for the skills employers actually ask for locally: customer service, Microsoft Office, data entry, computer proficiency, and Excel where relevant.[15]
• Set your search radius and schedule around an on-site market instead of a remote-first one, because about 90% of local postings are on-site and less than 5% are remote.[14]
• Build a target list of multi-location employers in restaurants, wellness and fitness, retail, and nonclinical healthcare because those segments are supplying much of the visible local demand.[16]

Days 31-60

• Practice a tighter interview story around scheduling, calendar ownership, document flow, call handling, and error reduction.
• Add one tangible systems upgrade to your profile, such as advanced calendaring, Excel cleanup, shared inbox management, or workflow automation.
• Apply to temp-to-perm and contract openings as well as permanent ones; Robert Half found 44% of administrative leaders expected to add contract or temporary talent.[17]
• If you have at least a year of experience, start targeting executive-assistant and office-manager-adjacent openings instead of staying only in general admin searches.

Days 61-90

• If response rates stay weak, expand into adjacent roles such as HR coordinator, project coordinator, sales coordinator, or customer success coordinator.
• Complete a small portfolio of admin artifacts you can show: formatted spreadsheet, meeting agenda, scheduling workflow, and document-control example.
• Shift your applications toward roles that combine admin with coordination, reporting, or workflow ownership rather than pure task execution.
• Reassess your pay floor using the local median and subrole spread so you do not hold out for executive-assistant pay in receptionist or clerk searches.[18][19]

Methodology and Confidence

This September 2026 report was generated on October 10, 2026. Latest direct national data: September 2026. Latest direct Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI data: September 2026.

Confidence: Overall confidence: High. Recent local occupation, wage, and labor-market context data support the main conclusions.

Limitations

• Local wage data for office and administrative support comes from May 2025, so pay levels are reliable as a baseline but may not fully capture late-2026 movement in specific subroles.
• This category covers a wide mix of work, from reception and general office support to executive assistant roles, so averages can hide big differences in both pay and competitiveness across subroles.
• Statewide occupation-specific labor data was used as a proxy where metro-level occupation hiring trend data is not published, so Minnesota direction signals may not match Minneapolis-St. Paul exactly.
• Some monthly labor-force changes for August 2026 are subject to revision, and unemployment measures can differ depending on whether they are seasonally adjusted or not.
• The Callings.ai job database is a partial, deduplicated sample of online postings, so it is more useful for spotting demand patterns, named employers, work-arrangement mix, and requested skills than for treating posting counts or percentage shares as exact market totals.

References

1. Reveliolabs. Mass-layoff Notices — Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) · 2026-09 · reveliolabs.com
2. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-09 · callings.ai
3. Reveliolabs. Job Openings — Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) · 2026-09 · reveliolabs.com
4. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Industry and occupational employment projections overview and highlights, 2024–34 : Monthly Labor Review : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · 2026-08 · bls.gov
5. Reveliolabs. Employment — Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) · 2026-09 · reveliolabs.com
6. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Artificial intelligence, information technology, and employment, 2024–34 : The Economics Daily : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · 2026-07 · bls.gov
7. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-09 · data.bls.gov
8. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-08 · data.bls.gov
9. Federal Reserve Economic Data. Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items in U.S. City Average · 2026-08 · fred.stlouisfed.org
10. Federal Reserve Economic Data. Average Hourly Earnings of All Employees, Total Private · 2026-09 · fred.stlouisfed.org
11. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-09 · callings.ai
12. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-09 · callings.ai
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14. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-09 · callings.ai
15. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-09 · callings.ai
16. Robert Half. Administrative career paths, skills and job search strategies for 2026 · 2026-06 · roberthalf.com
17. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · data.bls.gov
18. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Employment and Wages in Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington — May 2025 : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · 2026-07 · bls.gov
19. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · data.bls.gov
20. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · data.bls.gov
21. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · data.bls.gov
22. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-09 · callings.ai
23. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-09 · callings.ai
24. Reveliolabs. Salaries — Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) · 2026-09 · reveliolabs.com
25. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · data.bls.gov
26. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-08 · data.bls.gov
27. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-08 · data.bls.gov
28. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-08 · data.bls.gov
29. Robert Half. Robert Half Real Talk: The 2026 Salary Trends You Can’t Afford to Miss · 2026-07 · roberthalf.com
30. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-09 · callings.ai
31. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-09 · callings.ai

Live Openings in This Market

This report is published monthly; its companion page tracks the active Administrative & Office Support openings in Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI from the live Callings.ai job index. Browse current Administrative & Office Support openings in Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI.