Who Works in the Creative Industries? Employment, Wages and the Freelance Problem

Creative industries employment statistics describe one of the most unusual labour markets in any economy: highly qualified, well paid on average, concentrated in capital cities, and more than twice as likely as the rest of the workforce to be self-employed. In this guide the Kurums Startup team sets out the 2025–2026 figures from Eurostat, DCMS, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, UNESCO and TÜİK, looks at wages and demographics, and explains why the freelance structure is both the sector’s strength and its central policy problem. It is part of the Arts & Creative Economy hub; see also how big the global creative economy is and, for HR readers, our piece on arts benefits and employer branding.

How many people work in the creative industries worldwide?

UNESCO’s Global Report on Cultural Policies, released at MONDIACULT in September 2025, estimates that cultural and creative industries account for 3.55% of global employment, which on an ILO world labour force of about 3.5 billion implies roughly 120–125 million people. Older UNESCO and ILO-based figures put the share at 6.2%.

The spread between those two estimates is the first thing to understand about creative employment data. The 3.55% figure counts main jobs in formally defined cultural and creative sectors; the 6.2% figure, which the FTI Consulting and World Governments Summit Creative Futures report of February 2026 still uses, includes informal, secondary and part-time creative work that national labour surveys struggle to capture. Both are defensible; they answer different questions. UNCTAD’s Creative Economy Outlook 2024 found that across the countries reporting to it, the creative economy’s share of employment ranged from 0.5% to 12.5%.

What do Eurostat, DCMS and the BEA say about creative employment?

Eurostat counted 8.9 million people in cultural employment in the EU in 2025 (4.3% of total employment, up 1.3%); DCMS counted 2.46 million creative industries jobs in the UK in 2025 (17.3% above 2019); and the BEA counted 5.4 million wage-and-salary jobs in US arts and cultural industries in 2023.

The Eurostat series is the most detailed on structure. In 2025, 31.6% of EU cultural workers were self-employed against 13.7% across the economy; 61.9% held a tertiary qualification against 39.5%; and women were 49.6% of the cultural workforce against 46.5% of all employment, the smallest gender gap on record. The Netherlands had the highest cultural employment share at 5.7%, Romania the lowest at 1.8%. Italy had the highest self-employment rate at 47.7%. Bulgaria (+10.6%) and Cyprus (+10.1%) grew fastest, Luxembourg (−11.6%) shrank most. Eurostat warns that because its survey records only each respondent’s main job, the series understates cultural work.

The UK’s DCMS employment estimates for 2025 show 2,464,000 filled jobs in the creative industries, no significant change on 2024 but 363,000 more than in 2019 and 57.8% more than in 2011. The wider “creative economy”, which adds creative occupations in non-creative firms, reached 4.3 million jobs, with 3.1 million in creative occupations overall. London held 30.3% of creative industries jobs and the South East 16.0%. Women were 38.1% of the workforce, disabled people 14.7%, and the ethnic breakdown was 80.9% White, 10.0% Asian or Asian British and 3.7% Black.

The BEA’s Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account, published in April 2025 with 2023 data, counted 5.4 million wage-and-salary jobs, up 0.3% on the year, with compensation up 3.6%. Employment rose in 27 states, led by North Carolina (+7.6%, 167,254 jobs). The BEA count excludes the self-employed, who make up a large share of US artists, so it understates the arts workforce in the same way Eurostat does.

Why is self-employment so high in creative work?

Creative output is project-based: a film, an exhibition, a campaign or an album has a start and an end, and employers prefer to hire for the project rather than carry staff between them. The result is a self-employment rate two to three times the economy-wide average in every market with reliable data.

The UK numbers show how the rate climbs as you move from commercial to cultural work. Across the creative industries as a whole, self-employment was 28% in the year to March 2025 against 14% for the UK workforce, according to the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre’s reading of DCMS data. In the cultural sector (museums, performing arts, visual arts, heritage) it was 49% in 2023, per Cebr’s April 2025 analysis for Arts Council England. In the EU, Eurostat’s 31.6% self-employment rate in culture compares with 13.7% overall, and in Italy nearly half of cultural workers are self-employed.

The flexibility cuts both ways. Firms get access to specialist skills without fixed cost, which is one reason 93% of the UK’s 269,655 creative businesses are microbusinesses. Workers get autonomy and variety, and the best earn well. But freelancers in the EU are less likely to hold a permanent contract (81.9% of cultural workers versus 87.1% overall) and less likely to work full time (75.5% versus about 81%), and among artists and writers 10% hold more than one job against 4% of all workers.

Generative AI is now adding a new layer of pressure on the freelance tier. A CISAC-commissioned study projected that creators in music and audiovisual could lose a cumulative $28 billion of revenue by 2028 ($12.7 billion in music, $15 billion in audiovisual), with translators and subtitlers facing 56% of revenue at risk. UNESCO’s 2025 report found 38% of surveyed cultural workers already reported an AI-linked decline in income. Those losses fall first on self-employed workers with no employer to absorb the shock.

How much do creative workers earn?

Creative industries employees in the UK earned a median £45,822 a year in April 2025, 39% above the £32,890 median for all UK employees, according to DCMS’s earnings estimates. The premium reflects the weight of software, advertising and architecture in the sector; the arts and heritage sub-sectors pay well below the national median.

The composition effect is large. IT, software and computer services generated £62.4 billion of the UK’s £145.8 billion creative GVA in 2024 and advertising and marketing £24.3 billion; these are the sub-sectors with six-figure senior salaries. Performing arts, museums, crafts and visual arts, which most people picture when they think of creative work, sit at the other end, with high self-employment and low median earnings. The DCMS data also shows a gender pay gap of 19.5% across DCMS sectors against 12.8% for the UK, and the Policy and Evidence Centre notes women are only 34% of creative industries managers and directors.

At the global level, UNESCO’s 2025 report is blunter: only 9% of artists worldwide believe their economic and social rights are well protected, and although 60% of countries have minimum-wage laws that nominally cover artists, only 22% of surveyed NGOs confirm those laws are enforced. In South Korea, by contrast, the content industry’s 157.4 trillion won of sales and $14.08 billion of exports in 2024 have created a large formal employment base; Oxford Economics’ April 2026 study for the MPA found the screen sector alone supported 291,100 jobs, nearly four in five of them in small and medium-sized firms.

Who gets creative jobs? Gender, class and geography

Creative employment is close to gender parity in the EU (49.6% women in 2025) but not in leadership or globally: UNESCO’s 2025 report found women are 38% of the world’s cultural workforce, receive 20% of public culture funding and hold under 30% of leadership posts. Class and geography are even more skewed.

The UK has the best data on social background, and it is uncomfortable. The Policy and Evidence Centre reports that 52% of creative industries workers came from higher socio-economic backgrounds against 38% across all industries, that 60% of arts, culture and heritage workers grew up in a household where the main earner was a manager or professional (43% for the whole workforce), and that only 8.4% of people in film, TV, video, radio and photography identify as working class. Reaching the wider economy’s class mix would require about 263,000 more working-class people in creative roles. The freelance structure is part of the cause: unpaid internships and unstable early-career income filter out those without family support.

Geography concentrates further. London holds 30.3% of UK creative industries jobs on the DCMS 2025 count and 33.7% of creative businesses, and London with the Greater South East holds 62% of businesses. 57% of UK “createch” companies and 78% of its AI and data createch firms are in London. In China, 79.7% of the revenue of large culture enterprises comes from the eastern coastal provinces. In the EU, the Netherlands (5.7%), the Nordics and the Baltics have the highest cultural employment shares; Romania (1.8%), Bulgaria and Slovakia the lowest, although Romania and Bulgaria are growing fastest from that base.

How does Türkiye’s creative workforce compare?

TÜİK’s Kültür Ekonomisi 2024 release (December 2025) counted 957,000 people in cultural employment in Türkiye, 2.9% of total employment and up 6.5% on the year, a share below the EU average of 4.3% but growing faster than most EU members.

The Turkish figure uses the Eurostat-aligned definition, so it is directly comparable: Türkiye’s share sits between Romania (1.8%) and the EU median, and its 6.5% growth would have placed it among the five fastest-growing EU markets in 2025. TÜİK does not yet publish self-employment or gender breakdowns, but the sector’s structure (drama production, music, publishing, crafts, architecture and design in Istanbul) suggests freelance rates at least as high as the EU’s 31.6%.

Television drama is the clearest employment engine. Series exports passed $500 million in 2024 and reach more than 150 countries, and a single prime-time production employs several hundred people across cast, crew, post-production and dubbing, most of them on project contracts. Combined with the 408.3 billion lira of culture expenditure TÜİK recorded for 2024, half of it by households, the sector is larger than its 0.9% GDP share suggests. Our Türkiye creative economy playbook covers the policy picture.

What is being done about the freelance problem?

Governments are responding with three tools: statutory minimum fees and social protection for artists, sector plans that fund training and skills, and labour-market measures that clarify employment status. Progress is uneven, and enforcement lags legislation almost everywhere.

Social protection is the oldest lever. France’s intermittents du spectacle unemployment regime, Germany’s Künstlersozialkasse (which subsidises artists’ pension and health contributions) and Belgium’s reformed artist status are the European models; UNESCO’s 2025 report found 60% of countries have some minimum-wage protection for artists but only 22% of NGOs see it enforced. The EU Parliament has called for a directive on the social and professional situation of artists, and the Commission’s 2024–2025 work on platform work and bogus self-employment touches the sector indirectly.

Sector plans are the newer lever. The UK’s Creative Industries Sector Plan of June 2025 commits to skills and training investment alongside growth funding, and Cebr’s case studies show what works at local level: the Factory Academy in Greater Manchester trained more than 1,000 residents with 60% employed within three to six months, and the National Theatre’s apprenticeship scheme sent 90% of its apprentices into creative employment. South Korea’s Ministry of Culture pairs its 400 trillion won K-culture market target for 2030 with content-industry labour funds, and Saudi Arabia’s Cultural Scholarship Program is building a workforce almost from scratch, with sector employment up 318% since 2018.

For employers, the practical response is to treat freelancers as a managed workforce: standard contracts, prompt payment, access to training and a clear line between contractors and disguised employees. Our HR pillar explains how firms use artist-in-residence programmes to bring creative talent inside without the compliance risk, and the HR department hub covers contractor classification more broadly.

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