Is Administrative & Office Support a Good Job Market in Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD?

Executive Verdict

Market rating: competitive | Confidence: High

Philadelphia is still a real market for Administrative & Office Support, but it is not an easy one. The metro had 320,580 office and administrative support jobs in May 2025, equal to 11.1% of local employment, and metro unemployment was 4.4% in August 2026 while overall employment rose 2.6130% year over year.[18][25][27] The harder part is that occupation-specific momentum is softer than the general economy: administrative & office support employment in Pennsylvania was essentially flat year over year in September 2026, active postings were down 12.4%, and the local office-support share had already fallen from 12.5% of jobs in May 2023 to 11.1% in May 2025.[10][11][6]

Best positioned: The best odds right now go to candidates who are open to on-site work and can show customer service, data entry, and Microsoft Office strength for healthcare, restaurant, retail, and front-desk style roles.[1][14][2]

Main caution: The biggest mistake is treating remote executive-assistant pay as the baseline outcome: less than 5% of postings are remote, and executive assistant pay sits far above the broader office-support average.[14][18]

What Changed Recently

• Metro unemployment was 4.4% in August 2026, the unemployment level fell -18.1656% year over year, and total metro employment rose 2.6130%.[25][26][27]: The broader Philadelphia job market looks healthier than a year ago, so employers are still hiring, but candidates cannot rely on a weak labor market to create easy openings.
• Professional and Business Services employment in the metro rose 1.7308% year over year in August 2026, but administrative & office support postings in Pennsylvania were down 12.4% year over year and employment in the occupation was essentially flat statewide in September 2026.[28][11][10]: That combination usually means replacement hiring is stronger than true expansion hiring, so fit and speed matter more than waiting for a hiring surge.
• Philadelphia-area employers posted 49,244 unique jobs in Q2 2026, with universities and hospitals leading by industry and staffing agencies ranking second, while 13,922 local residents filed new unemployment claims, up 20.7% year over year.[4]: Healthcare-linked employers and staffing channels deserve attention, but the broader market still carries enough churn that a passive search is risky.
• National inflation and private-sector hourly earnings were both running about +3.0% year over year in late summer 2026, while national unemployment was 4.2% in September 2026.[9][29][7]: If your target pay has not moved since 2025, you may only be treading water in real terms unless you move into a higher-value admin niche.

What This Means for You

Entry-Level Candidates

Difficulty: Moderate to high. About 75% of local postings are entry level, which creates access, but it also concentrates a lot of competition in the same openings.[13]

Best target: Aim first at on-site front-desk, receptionist, dispatcher, and admin-assistant jobs in healthcare, restaurants, retail, and wellness, where current posting activity is concentrated.[1][14]

Biggest mistake: Assuming a degree is the main differentiator or holding out for remote work. Among postings that state an education requirement, high school diploma or equivalent dominates, and less than 5% of postings are remote.[24][14]

Next step: Build a resume version that leads with customer service, data entry, Microsoft Office, Word, and Excel, then apply through both direct employers and staffing firms.[2][4]

Mid-Career Candidates

Difficulty: High for pure executive-support or office-leadership roles because less than 5% of current postings are senior and less than 5% are lead+.[13]

Best target: Go after executive assistant, admin coordinator, or office-ops roles where you can prove calendar ownership, stakeholder coordination, reporting, and process cleanup rather than just years in seat.

Biggest mistake: Competing on tenure alone. Robert Half reported that 83% of administrative and customer support leaders would pay more for specialized or technology-enabled skills.[17]

Next step: Add one specialization with visible business value, such as Excel-heavy reporting, AI-assisted documentation, or industry context in healthcare or retail, and rewrite your bullets around time saved or errors reduced.[1][2][17]

Career Switchers

Difficulty: Moderate if you already come from retail, hospitality, wellness, or customer-facing operations.

Best target: Bridge into service-admin hybrid roles first, because the local mix is concentrated in restaurants, healthcare, retail, and wellness and the most common requested skills map well from those backgrounds.[1][2]

Biggest mistake: Trying to jump straight to executive assistant roles without first proving data entry accuracy, office software basics, and front-desk professionalism.

Next step: Translate cash handling, inventory, scheduling, and customer issue resolution into admin language, then target on-site roles first because about 90% of postings are on-site.[14][2]

Salary Reality

moderate pay broad access

Government data puts the broad Philadelphia office-support group at a $49,040 median annual wage, a $53,220 mean, $40,700 at the 25th percentile, and $61,450 at the 75th percentile in 2025.[19][20][15][21] Current posted salary ranges in the local job sample center on about $50k to $65k, with a broader 25th-75th band of about $40k to $80k; hourly-paid postings center on about $17 to $20 / hour.[16][22] A separate Philadelphia-area estimate places administrative assistants near a $23.49 hourly median, approximately $48,859 annually, which is useful as a directional check rather than a direct government benchmark.[23]

This is a market where standard admin work can still land in the mid-$40k to low-$60k range, but the best outcomes usually come from on-site roles with clear operational value rather than generic office support alone.

The category still offers access, but leverage is limited by softer occupation demand and scarce flexibility: Pennsylvania admin postings are down 12.4% year over year, and less than 5% of local postings are remote.[11][14]

Best-paying path: The strongest pay sits in executive secretary and executive administrative assistant work, which averaged $81,040 per year and $38.96 per hour locally in May 2025, versus $25.59 per hour for the broader occupational group.[18]

Caution: Do not anchor on executive-assistant pay as the default. The metro had 7,150 executive secretary and executive administrative assistant jobs versus 320,580 office-support jobs overall, and the BLS figures here are averages, not guaranteed offers.[18]

Where the Opportunities Are Concentrated

Real opportunity is concentrated in on-site, customer-facing support rather than classic back-office-only work. In the local posting mix, the biggest industry slices are restaurants at about 25%, hospitals and health care at about 20%, healthcare at about 15%, retail at about 15%, and wellness and fitness services at about 10%.[1] That lines up with the most-requested skills: customer service and data entry at about 20% each, plus Microsoft Office, Word, and Excel.[2] The market is broad across employers, but not deep at the senior end. There were more than 650 postings across more than 350 companies in the last 90 days, hiring is fragmented rather than concentrated, and about 75% of roles in the sample were entry level.[30][5][13] At the same time, about 90% of postings were on-site, about 5% hybrid, and less than 5% remote, so location flexibility is not where most candidates will win.[14] The most practical search lanes are healthcare-adjacent front desk/admin, restaurant and retail service-admin hybrids, and staffing-firm pipelines into office support. Philadelphia Works reported that universities and hospitals led local hiring activity in Q2 2026, with staffing agencies second, which supports a search strategy that mixes direct applications with temp-to-hire channels.[4]

• On-site customer-facing admin (high): Front desk, receptionist, intake, and general admin work tied to healthcare, restaurants, retail, and wellness. These roles fit the current industry mix and the strongest skill signals around customer service and data entry.[1][2]
• Executive and leadership support (limited): This is the best-paying lane, but it is much narrower than the broader category and senior openings are a small slice of the sample.[18][13]
• Staffing-agency and temp-to-hire office support (moderate): Regional hiring data shows staffing agencies as a major channel, making contract-to-perm and short-cycle searches especially relevant for candidates who need a faster re-entry path.[4]

Where to focus: Prioritize on-site healthcare, restaurant, retail, and staffing-agency pathways before chasing remote general office roles.

Skills and Credentials Worth Pursuing

• Customer service (table stakes): It appears in about 20% of local postings and matches the market's concentration in restaurants, healthcare, retail, and wellness.[1][2]
• Data entry (table stakes): It also appears in about 20% of postings and is one of the clearest screening skills for high-volume admin hiring.[2]
• Microsoft Office (table stakes): Microsoft Office shows up in about 15% of local postings, with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel each appearing in about 10%.[2]
• Excel-heavy reporting (differentiator): Excel appears in about 10% of local postings, and employers are placing more value on specialized, technology-enabled capability instead of generic admin experience alone.[2][17]
• Digital adaptability and AI-assisted admin work (premium): Robert Half reported that 83% of administrative and customer support leaders would offer higher pay for candidates with specialized or technology-enabled skills, citing AI and data analysis as examples.[17]
• Organization and communication (differentiator): Robert Half highlighted organization and communication, paired with digital proficiency and adaptability, as traits of in-demand administrative professionals.[17]
• Inventory management and cash handling (differentiator): These skills show up in about 10% of local postings and make more sense in Philadelphia than in many markets because restaurant and retail employers are a meaningful share of demand.[1][2]

Adjacent Roles to Consider

• Recruiting coordinator (both): It uses the same scheduling, communication, document handling, and office-software strengths that matter in admin work, while moving you into a more specialized people-ops track.
• Patient access representative (bridge): Healthcare-related employers make up a large share of current local posting activity, and the transfer from front desk, customer service, and data entry is direct.[1][2]
• Accounts payable or finance operations assistant (pivot): Admins with strong accuracy, Excel, and document-processing habits can move into finance-support work with relatively little reinvention.
• Sales operations coordinator (both): This path rewards customer communication, data hygiene, spreadsheet work, and follow-through, which overlap with the strongest local admin signals.[2]

30 / 60 / 90-Day Plan

First 30 Days

• Create two resume versions: one for front-desk or customer-facing admin work and one for executive-support or office-ops work.
• Add a visible skills block with customer service, data entry, Microsoft Office, Word, and Excel so you match common local filters.[2]
• Build a target list around healthcare, restaurants, retail, wellness, and staffing agencies instead of waiting for remote general office jobs.[1][14][4]
• Set a realistic pay floor and target band using local wage reality: broad-admin pay is around a $49,040 median, while current local posted ranges center on about $50k to $65k for salaried roles.[15][16]

Days 31-60

• Complete one proof-of-work sample, such as an Excel tracker, intake log, calendar coordination workflow, or meeting-support packet, and bring it to interviews.
• Register with at least two staffing firms because agencies are a major local hiring channel right now.[4]
• If you come from service work, rewrite experience in admin terms: cash handling, inventory, shift coordination, and issue resolution can all convert into office-readiness language.[2]
• Practice interview answers around in-person availability and schedule flexibility because about 90% of openings are on-site.[14]

Days 61-90

• Review your response rate by lane and double down: if healthcare and front-desk roles respond, specialize there; if higher-end support roles respond, invest more in executive-support positioning.
• Add one pay-leveraging specialization such as Excel reporting, AI-assisted documentation, or data analysis, since 83% of leaders say they will pay more for specialized or technology-enabled skills.[17]
• If progress stalls, widen into adjacent paths such as recruiting coordination, patient access, or finance operations support.
• Negotiate against scope, not title: reserve top-end asks for jobs that truly resemble executive assistant work rather than general office support.[18]

Methodology and Confidence

This September 2026 report was generated on October 10, 2026. Latest direct national data: September 2026. Latest direct Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD data: September 2026.

Confidence: Overall confidence: High. Based on 25 direct local occupation data points and 49 total local evidence items with recent coverage.

Limitations

• Some of the best occupation-specific local wage and employment benchmarks for Administrative & Office Support come from 2025, so current 2026 conditions may be tighter or looser for particular titles than those benchmark tables show.
• Recent metro unemployment, employment, and labor-force changes are subject to revision, so short-term trend readings should be treated as provisional rather than final.
• Statewide occupation trend data was used as a proxy where metro-level occupation trend series was not available, which means Pennsylvania posting and employment direction may not match the Philadelphia metro perfectly.
• The Callings.ai job database is a partial, deduplicated sample of online postings, so it is more reliable for spotting direction of demand, leading employer names, work arrangements, and skill patterns than for exact market size or precise employer share.
• This category bundles together very different jobs, so broad averages can hide large gaps between lower-paid front-desk work and much better-paid executive assistant roles.

References

1. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-09 · callings.ai
2. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-09 · callings.ai
3. Reveliolabs. Mass-layoff Notices — Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) · 2026-09 · reveliolabs.com
4. Philaworks. Philadelphia's Quarterly Labor Market Report: 2026 Q2 - Philadelphia Works · 2026-09 · philaworks.org
5. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-09 · callings.ai
6. Economyleague. Philadelphia’s Career Ladder Isn’t Disappearing — But Its First Rung May Be Changing | Economy League of Greater Philadelphia · 2026-08 · economyleague.org
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 · 2026-09 · 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. Reveliolabs. Employment — Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) · 2026-09 · reveliolabs.com
11. Reveliolabs. Job Openings — Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) · 2026-09 · reveliolabs.com
12. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-09 · callings.ai
13. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-09 · callings.ai
14. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-09 · callings.ai
15. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · data.bls.gov
16. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-09 · callings.ai
17. Robert Half. Robert Half Real Talk: The 2026 Salary Trends You Can’t Afford to Miss · 2026-07 · roberthalf.com
18. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Employment and Wages in Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington — 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. Bespree. Administrative Assistant Salary in Philadelphia | 2025 Pay Range — Bespree · 2026-01 · bespree.com
24. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-09 · callings.ai
25. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-08 · 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. Federal Reserve Economic Data. Average Hourly Earnings of All Employees, Total Private · 2026-09 · fred.stlouisfed.org
30. 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 Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD from the live Callings.ai job index. Browse current Administrative & Office Support openings in Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD.