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

Executive Verdict

Market rating: balanced | Confidence: High

This is a workable market for Administrative & Office Support, but not an easy one. Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington has a large office-support base with 214,110 workers, equal to 11.0% of local employment, and metro unemployment stood at 4.2% in June 2026.[25][26] The local backdrop looks better than the national one for this occupation: Minnesota administrative and office support postings were up 5.7% year over year in July 2026 even as national postings for the occupation were down 8.7%, but Minneapolis-area wages and salaries rose only 1.3% over the year ended June 2026.[10][27] Expect the best odds if you can handle on-site or hybrid work, show at least a couple of years of experience, and prove strong Microsoft Office or systems-based coordination skills.[12][4][5]

Best positioned: Candidates with 2-3+ years of administrative experience, Microsoft Office fluency, and flexibility for on-site or hybrid work have the clearest edge right now.[12][4][5]

Main caution: Do not treat this like a remote-friendly or purely entry-level market: about 85% of sampled openings were on-site, less than 5% were remote, and fresh local roles are often asking for 2+ or 3+ years of experience.[12][4][5]

What Changed Recently

• Minnesota administrative and office support postings were up 5.7% year over year in July 2026, while Minnesota postings across all occupations were down 2.2%.[10]: This category is holding up better than the broader state hiring market, which is a meaningful positive for Twin Cities job seekers.
• Minneapolis-area wages and salaries rose 1.3% over the 12 months ended June 2026.[27]: You can still find decent-paying openings, but employers are not broadly bidding pay up fast, so leverage is stronger for specialized candidates than for general applicants.
• Recent local openings reinforce an office-first pattern: about 85% of sampled postings were on-site, about 10% hybrid, and less than 5% remote, and one Saint Paul administrative assistant opening was hybrid three days onsite.[12][5]: If you are only searching for remote admin work, you are cutting yourself off from most of the real market.
• Current metro examples show tighter screening: Target's Minneapolis headquarters asks for 2+ years of administrative experience and Microsoft Office, while another Saint Paul role requires 3+ years and pays $29-$33/hour equivalent.[4][5]: Employers are rewarding proof of experience and concrete office-tool fluency more than generic administrative resumes.
• Nationally, job openings totaled 7,359 thousand in June 2026 and the openings rate was 4.4%, but hires were only 0.3942% above a year earlier and quits were down -0.6761% year over year.[33][9][34][35]: The U.S. market still has openings, but worker movement is slower, so local employers can afford to be pickier and slower-moving.

What This Means for You

Entry-Level Candidates

Difficulty: Moderate to hard.

Best target: On-site front desk, receptionist, and general office roles in healthcare, food & beverage, and retail, where the local sample shows meaningful activity and employers often accept high school-level credentials.[1][2]

Biggest mistake: Holding out for remote assistant jobs or presenting yourself as 'detail-oriented' without any proof of customer-facing, scheduling, or document-handling experience.

Next step: Lead with customer service, Microsoft Office, and time management, then add one concrete workflow, scheduling, or data-entry example near the top of your resume.[3][4]

Mid-Career Candidates

Difficulty: Manageable if your resume shows ownership, not just support tasks.

Best target: Contract-to-hire administrative assistant roles, senior admin openings, and office-manager-adjacent jobs where employers want 2-3+ years, Microsoft Office, and broader coordination responsibility.[4][5]

Biggest mistake: Underselling process improvement, vendor coordination, or cross-team follow-up and instead listing only clerical duties.

Next step: Create two resume versions: one for senior administrative support and one for office-operations coordination, with metrics on calendar ownership, meeting prep, travel, reporting, or stakeholder communication.

Career Switchers

Difficulty: Competitive but realistic if you are coming from customer-facing operations.

Best target: Customer-facing office roles and property-management or site-based admin openings, especially if you can show bilingual ability or cash-handling and service experience.[6][3]

Biggest mistake: Aiming straight at executive-assistant titles without first translating your past work into office systems, scheduling, and written communication outcomes.

Next step: Rewrite your experience into office language: phone and email handling, appointment coordination, documentation, problem resolution, and bilingual service if you have it.[6][3]

Salary Reality

stable pay slow advancement

The cleanest local anchor is BLS: office and administrative support in the metro averaged $27.00 an hour and $56,150 a year in May 2025.[25] More current directional signals are wider: active local postings center on about $55k to $70k for salaried roles and about $19 to $22/hour for hourly roles, and one August 2026 Saint Paul opening advertised $29-$33/hour equivalent for an experienced administrative assistant.[13][14][5]

This is respectable pay for a broad support category, but it is not a fast-rising market because Minneapolis-area wages and salaries advanced only 1.3% over the year ended June 2026.[27]

The better-paying openings tend to sit in office manager, senior admin, or executive-support lanes, and they usually come with experience screens, broader coordination scope, or more on-site expectations.[12][4][5][32]

Best-paying path: The strongest pay appears to cluster in office manager and executive-support tracks: local estimates put office managers around $55,000-$78,000 and experienced personal assistants around $65,000-$95,000, while Robert Half's national midpoint is $70,250 for executive assistants versus $46,500 for administrative assistants.[32][31]

Caution: Do not treat the top end as typical. Minnesota's mean offered salary on new openings was ~$53,402 in July 2026 (n=1,708), and the local posting band spans from about $45k to $87k depending on title, employer, and experience level.[36][13]

Where the Opportunities Are Concentrated

Real opportunity is spread across many employers rather than locked inside one dominant company. In the last 90 days, the local sample showed more than 700 postings across more than 300 companies, and hiring looked fragmented rather than concentrated.[20][21] Named activity included Dominos with more than 100 postings and System One, Inc. with more than 75, while fresh August openings also appeared at Target in Minneapolis and Oaks Properties LLC.[23][4][6] Industry demand is not uniform. The most active slices in the posting sample were healthcare at about 25%, food & beverage at about 25%, HR consulting at about 20%, retail at about 10%, and sports & recreation at about 5%.[1] Because about 85% of postings were on-site and about 10% hybrid, the practical center of gravity is front-office, site-based coordination, and in-person support rather than remote virtual assistant work.[12] The best niche opportunities sit where employers need more than basic clerical help: headquarters support with Microsoft Office fluency, contract-to-hire roles that can convert after proving fit, and bilingual community-facing office work.[4][5][6]

• On-site front-office and general admin roles (high): This is the largest practical lane because the local mix is heavily on-site and concentrated in service-heavy industries such as healthcare, food & beverage, and retail.[1][12]
• Contract-to-hire administrative assistant roles (moderate): Current metro hiring includes contract-to-hire admin work with hybrid structure, which can be a faster path back in for candidates who can convert after proving fit.[5]
• Headquarters and senior support roles (moderate): Large-employer support jobs still exist, including a current senior administrative opening at Target's Minneapolis headquarters, but they screen harder for experience and tool fluency.[4]
• Bilingual property-management and community-facing office work (moderate): An Oaks Properties Minneapolis opening preferred Spanish, which suggests a real edge for bilingual candidates in tenant-facing and office-service environments.[6]

Where to focus: Focus first on on-site or hybrid administrative roles that can expand into office-manager or higher-trust coordination work, not remote-only assistant searches.

Skills and Credentials Worth Pursuing

• Microsoft Office (table stakes): It shows up in fresh metro hiring, including a Target headquarters senior admin role, and it also appears in about 10% of sampled local postings.[4][3]
• Customer service (table stakes): It was the most common named skill at about 20% of local postings, which fits the market's front-desk and site-based support mix.[3]
• SAP or business-system navigation (differentiator): SAP appeared in about 10% of local postings, which suggests employers want staff who can work inside business systems, not just answer phones and format documents.[3]
• Spanish (differentiator): A current Minneapolis office administrative assistant role listed Spanish as preferred, making bilingual ability a real edge in some community-facing jobs.[6]
• AI workflow tools (premium): Administrative professionals are increasingly using Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Power Automate, Zapier, and Otter.ai, and over 75% report already using AI at work.[16][17]
• MOS, CAP, or PACE (differentiator): Local postings rarely require formal certifications, but national hiring guidance says CAP, MOS, and PACE carry more weight with hiring managers.[22][15]
• CAPM or project coordination skills (premium): Administrative work is increasingly overlapping with project management, AI tool administration, and process redesign, which makes project credentials more useful than generic office certificates at the upper end.[19][15]

Adjacent Roles to Consider

• Project Coordinator (both): Administrative work is increasingly absorbing project management, process redesign, and structured follow-up work, making this one of the cleanest adjacent moves.[19][15]
• Workplace or Facilities Coordinator (bridge): Office-manager work is shifting toward hybrid-work design and employee-experience coordination, which overlaps naturally with workplace operations.[18]
• Operations Coordinator (both): AI tool administration and process redesign are moving closer to administrative work, so operations coordination is a logical next step for candidates who like systems and workflow ownership.[19][16]

30 / 60 / 90-Day Plan

First 30 Days

• Build two resume versions: one for general admin/front-office work and one for senior support or coordination work. Use keywords the local market is already rewarding, including customer service, Microsoft Office, SAP, and time management.[3][4]
• Expand your search to on-site and hybrid roles immediately. About 85% of sampled openings were on-site and less than 5% were remote.[12]
• Target industries with visible volume instead of applying randomly across office titles: healthcare, food & beverage, HR consulting, retail, and property management.[1][6]
• Set pay floors before interviews. Local hourly postings center on about $19 to $22/hour and salaried roles on about $55k to $70k, with stronger experienced openings sometimes higher.[13][14][5]

Days 31-60

• Finish one proof credential or sprint: MOS if your Office skills are rusty, or CAP/CAPM if you are aiming at higher-trust coordination work.[15]
• Create three short work samples: a meeting agenda plus action log, a tracking sheet, and one AI-assisted workflow example using tools such as Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, or Zapier-style automation.[16][17]
• Take at least one contract-to-hire lane seriously. A current Saint Paul administrative assistant role uses that model and may be a faster re-entry path than waiting for a perfect direct-hire opening.[5]
• If you speak another language, move it near the top of your resume and LinkedIn headline. A current Minneapolis office role already lists Spanish as preferred.[6]

Days 61-90

• If interviews are sparse, pivot from generic administrative assistant searches into project coordinator, workplace coordinator, or operations coordinator targets where your scheduling and process skills transfer.[18][19][15]
• Reposition toward better-paid support work by documenting calendar ownership, vendor coordination, reporting, travel support, meeting logistics, or conversion wins from past roles.
• Build a target list across fragmented hiring, not just a few brand names. The local market is spread across more than 300 companies, so a narrow list will miss too much activity.[20][21]
• Before any late-stage interview, ask directly about conversion timeline, on-site expectations, and system stack, because current roles are frequently combining experience screens with location requirements.[12][4][5]

Methodology and Confidence

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

Confidence: Overall confidence: High. The strongest local wage, unemployment, employer-pattern, and state-level occupation signals point in a consistent direction.

Limitations

• The best metro-level government wage and employment figures for this occupation still lag into 2025, so they describe the base of the market rather than this week's exact conditions.
• To keep the page current, this report also uses recent hiring and pay signals from job postings and salary guides; those are useful for direction, but they are not the same as official employment counts or wage surveys.
• The Callings.ai job database is a partial, deduplicated sample of online postings in the Twin Cities, so direction of demand, leading employer names, work-arrangement mix, and skill patterns are more reliable here than exact counts or exact market share.
• Statewide Minnesota occupation data was used as a proxy where metro-by-occupation monthly data is not published, which can blur differences between Minneapolis-St. Paul and the rest of the state.
• This page is intentionally scoped to general administrative and office support, so medical billing and records, accounting-payroll clerk work, warehouse clerks, and HR assistant roles are excluded even when employers title them similarly.

References

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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. Corporate. Sr Admin Assistant - Merch Cap - BPX at TARGET · 2026-08 · corporate.target.com
5. Bhsg. Administrative Assistant Saint Paul Minnesota · 2026-08 · bhsg.com
6. Bebee. Office Administrative Assistant (3+ Yrs Exp) - Oaks Properties LLC · 2026-08 · bebee.com
7. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-04 · data.bls.gov
8. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-07 · data.bls.gov
9. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-06 · data.bls.gov
10. Reveliolabs. Job Openings — Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) · 2026-07 · reveliolabs.com
11. Reveliolabs. Employment — Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) · 2026-07 · reveliolabs.com
12. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
13. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
14. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
15. Indeed. 10 Administrative Certifications to Look for in Candidates · 2026-07 · indeed.com
16. Robert Half. AI for administrative assistants: Tools, skills and career growth tips · 2026-07 · roberthalf.com
17. Smartevents. AI Tools for Administrative Professionals · 2026-07 · smartevents.mk
18. Careerexplorer. Will AI replace office managers? - CareerExplorer · 2026-08 · careerexplorer.com
19. Aiandyou. These jobs will disappear fastest by 2030 as AI rises, according to the World Economic Forum · 2026-07 · aiandyou.org
20. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
21. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
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24. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
25. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Employment and Wages in Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington — May 2025 · 2026-03 · bls.gov
26. Stlouisfed. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis · 2026-07 · stlouisfed.org
27. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Changing Compensation Costs in the Minneapolis Metropolitan Area — June 2026 · 2026-08 · bls.gov
28. Mn. Radware Bot Manager Captcha · 2026-07 · mn.gov
29. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
30. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
31. Robert Half. 2026 Administrative and Customer Service Salaries and Compensation Trends · 2025-10 · roberthalf.com
32. Callings. Admin Support Jobs in Minneapolis: May 2026 Outlook | Callings.ai · 2026-06 · callings.ai
33. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-06 · data.bls.gov
34. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-06 · data.bls.gov
35. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-06 · data.bls.gov
36. Reveliolabs. Salaries — Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) · 2026-07 · reveliolabs.com

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.