It's Not You — 4 Roles Proving Jobs Pay Less Than They Used To
These days, employers are offering less, asking more and hiring only the best-qualified candidates with the most experience, even for entry-level positions.
A new report from the workforce intelligence firm Revelio Labs highlights the risk of changing jobs — or simply finding yourself out of work — in 2026. Business Insider reported that four in 10 white-collar workers who changed jobs in the last year settled for pay cuts of more than 10%.
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The dynamic has two primary drivers. First, an unsteady job market that favors employers has replaced the highly mobile, job-hopping free-for-all of the post-pandemic period. Second, the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has weakened demand in several industries.
The following jobs are succumbing to both forces simultaneously — and the proof is in their lower paychecks.
Middle Management
In March, the CTO of the data intelligence firm Revealera analyzed 180 million jobs and found that while senior leadership positions are stable, middle-management postings are dwindling. More businesses are following Google’s lead in using AI to streamline operations while thinning their human management staff.
Tetiana Hnatiuk, head of human resources at AI-driven imaging software firm Skylum, has seen this decline in demand — and therefore pay — play out during six years of leading recruitment, people operations and organizational development.
“Until five to 10 years ago, companies actively expanded management teams, but now the business has become much more optimized,” she said. “AI, automation and modern reporting systems allow one person to manage larger teams.”
According to ZipRecruiter, the average middle manager earns $46,617 per year, a number that has remained stagnant or even fallen, depending on the job listing board, for several years running.
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Photographers
Thomas Rewwer, a data engineer and founder of AmericaByNumbers, a government data analysis platform that aids career, salary and relocation decisions, used BLS-published wage statistics to identify positions that saw year-over-year decreases in median annual wages.
Photographers — also mentioned as a salary-negative job in the Revelia report — saw their median annual pay fall from $44,922 to $43,612, a decline of $1,310 or 2.92%.
Computer Programmers
Computer programmers suffered a year-over-year decline in median annual salary from $100,785 to $98,575, a 2.19% drop, according to Rewwer’s analysis.
“Computer programmers losing $2,210 at the median while every adjacent code — software developers, web developers — gained, tells you the market is actively shifting work out of that classification,” Rewwer said. “Not that demand for code is falling, but that the title 'programmer' itself is being absorbed into higher-skill or AI-assisted roles."
Telemarketers
Among the most obvious candidates for the AI-initiated chopping block, telemarketers saw their year-over-year median pay fall from $34,317 to $33,725. That’s $592 less per year, a 1.73% decline.
That — like the relatively modest decrease among photographers and computer programmers — might not seem like much, but any decline is an ominous outlier.
"When a job code shows a drop in the BLS-published median wage, that's already a red flag,” Rewwer said. “Most occupations move slightly upward each year on nominal terms.”
Then there’s the harsh reality that a dollar buys less and less with each passing year, so any decrease in pay is magnified by the steady loss of purchasing power.
“Those are nominal declines, before inflation,” Rewwer said. “Once you adjust for the roughly 3.0% CPI change over the same window, the real-wage drop is closer to 5% for each of those three occupations.”
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