Municipal Clerk
| Median wage (USD) | 48700 |
|---|---|
| Projected employment growth (%) | 3 |
| AI exposure (%) | 59 |
| Maximum exposure (%) | 87 |
| Source | eloundou |
| What AI changes in this occupation | Entering permit applications, keeping registers and drafting routine notices and minutes are moving to tools that enter, file and draft — the paperwork side of municipal administration is the share being delegated The online one-stop counter moves citizen reception to the municipal portal, but it also raises the volume of applications to check and the need to verify identity and the compliance of what is filed Assessing an application against the by-law, issuing a vital record, verifying that documents are authentic and weighing the budget with elected officials remain human — that is where the municipality commits its liability |
| Key skills | Municipal administration and permit issuance · register keeping (vital records, permits, billing) and digital archiving · checking an application against the by-law · citizen-facing service and reception · budgeting and contract administration · personal information protection · case management and online service desk tools |
| Courses to get ahead | Smart Cities – Management of Smart Urban Infrastructures · Coursera (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) · 1 week, 10 hours per week · 90 · The course that best matches the gesture that is changing: the digitization of municipal services. It shows how a local government moves from the counter and the paper register to digital services — so you become accountable for the quality and integrity of municipal data instead of being its scribe. Cybersecurity for Everyone · Coursera (University of Maryland, College Park) · 2 weeks, 10 hours per week · 87 · A municipal office holds residents' vital records, billing rolls and identity documents: exactly the data a fraudster is after. The course covers personal information protection and identity verification — the control AI suggests but does not own. Customer Service Fundamentals · Coursera (Knowledge Accelerators) · 1 week, 10 hours per week · 85 · Citizen reception is the part of the job AI does not take: it is where a badly started file gets fixed, where a by-law is explained to someone who has to live with it and where a conflict is defused. The course gives the method that automated data entry does not replace. Introduction to Generative AI · Coursera (Google Cloud) · About 1 hour in total · 80 High-Impact Business Writing · Coursera (University of California, Irvine) · About 8 hours in total · 77 Research Data Management and Sharing · Coursera (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) · About 2 weeks · 74 |
| Occupations to pivot toward | Administrative Assistant · 47460 · 0 · 57 Construction and Building Inspector · 72120 · -1 · 14 Urban and Regional Planner · 89320 · 4 · 58 |
| Skills to acquire for the pivot | Eloundou measures the municipal clerk's exposure at 59% (human β) and up to 87% (human ζ): keeping municipal registers, entering and coding permit applications, drafting notices and agendas, answering routine public requests and filing archives are largely delegable to AI, but assessing an application against the by-law, advising on a specific situation, verifying that documents are authentic and weighing the budget with elected officials remain human. The ζ of 87% says nearly nine tenths of the job are at least partly transformable; the β of 59% says that today AI does close to three fifths of it without supervision. Within the repository, the municipal clerk sits exactly level with the court clerk (59), and for a methodological reason: the two cards share the same O*NET-SOC code, "Court, Municipal, and License Clerks" (43-4031.00), which covers judicial and municipal administration in a single occupation; the cards therefore split the two halves of that task list, the court clerk taking the court side, the municipal clerk the municipal side (vital records, permits, council meetings, archives). It sits above the general office clerk (50) and the administrative assistant (57), level with the urban planner (58), but well ahead of the construction and building inspector (14), whose work happens on site. Method note: the GPT-4 self-rated series (β 70, ζ 96) is kept in expositionGpt4 and is not displayed, in line with the decision of 21 August 2026. BLS growth is +3% from 2025 to 2035 for court, municipal and license clerks (SOC 43-4031): their 187,000 jobs in 2025 are projected to reach 193,300, about 6,300 more. BLS ties this to local governments, which continue to need these workers to prepare agendas, draft minutes and issue permits: this is a job anchored in a legal duty to keep records, not in an economic cycle. For comparison, the "information clerks" group in which BLS files this occupation declines 2% over the same period (1,287,600 to 1,257,600 jobs, -30,100), because it also contains hotel desk clerks and receptionists, and the "information and record clerks" subgroup declines 4%; all occupations grow 3%. Employers confirm it: local government excluding education and hospitals accounts for 18% of the group's employment, just behind traveler accommodation (19%), and BLS projects about 125,600 openings a year for the group as a whole, almost all from replacement. This card's three pivots point the same way: the administrative assistant is flat (0%), the construction and building inspector slips slightly (-1%) and the urban and regional planner grows (+4%) — municipal administration holds up better than general secretarial work, and the best-oriented way out lies towards planning. The municipal clerk's median salary is $48,700 a year ($23.41 an hour): the May 2025 figure from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey for code 43-4031, published on the Occupational Outlook Handbook's "Information clerks" page and reproduced on the occupation's O*NET page. The OOH has no page for this code: the median shown for the whole "information clerks" group ($45,430) is $3,270 below the occupation's figure, and it is the group figure that understates municipal administration. For context: all occupations stand at $50,980; inside the group, court, municipal and license clerks ($48,700) lead correspondence clerks ($46,800), order clerks ($46,170), interviewers ($45,920), reservation agents ($44,390), file clerks ($43,600) and hotel desk clerks ($35,070). By industry, state government excluding education and hospitals pays $51,290, local government excluding education and hospitals $48,720 and healthcare and social assistance $46,430. Entry requirements remain modest — a high school diploma and on-the-job training, according to the OOH — and the ceiling sits towards the construction and building inspector and the urban and regional planner ($89,320). Consistency check: the O*NET page for the same code gives 180,400 employees in 2024 and "average (3% to 4%)" growth over 2024-2034, which agrees with the BLS +3%. |
| GPT-4 exposure — beta / zeta (%) | 70 · 96 |