What a Back-Office Seat Costs in 2026: The BLS Wage and Outlook Data for Lenders and Dealers

TL;DR

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the May 2025 median annual wage at $47,030 for bill and account collectors, $44,770 for customer service representatives, $50,670 for bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks, $49,230 for insurance claims and policy processing clerks and $50,020 for loan interviewers and clerks.
• Every one of those occupations is projected to shrink between 2025 and 2035: collectors -10%, bookkeeping clerks -6%, customer service representatives -5%, financial clerks as a group -4%.
• A shrinking occupation is not an easy occupation to hire into. BLS still projects about 11,200 openings a year for collectors and about 289,500 a year for customer service representatives, and says all of the collector openings come from replacing people who leave, not from growth.
• A published wage is not a cost. It excludes the employer's payroll taxes, benefits, recruiting, training, telephony, workspace and the supervisor, so any in-house comparison that stops at the median understates the in-house side.
• The decision an operator actually faces is not "wage versus wage." It is how to add conversation capacity against a national pool of about 160,000 collectors that is projected to get smaller.

Why this matters

As of September 2026.

This is for the people who size a servicing, collections or back-office floor: operations directors at automotive finance companies, dealer principals and controllers at buy-here-pay-here dealerships, and the CFOs who sign off on the headcount plan. Twice a year the federal government publishes something directly relevant to that plan and it usually goes unread — the wage data in May and the ten-year employment projections that follow it.

This post reads both. It covers what the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports for the seven occupations that make up most of a lender's back office, what the new 2025-35 projections say about the hiring pool behind them, where the two BLS programs disagree and why, and what none of it tells you. Every figure below is attributed to the program that published it. Where a number is not available or not comparable, that is said rather than smoothed over.

The May 2025 wage picture, occupation by occupation

The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program surveys employers and publishes national estimates by occupation code. These are the May 2025 national estimates for the roles that staff auto-finance and dealership back offices.

SOC	Occupation	National employment	Annual median	Annual mean
43-3011	Bill and account collectors	158,830	$47,030	$49,060
43-4051	Customer service representatives	2,595,750	$44,770	$46,590
43-3031	Bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks	1,373,680	$50,670	$53,560
43-6014	Secretaries and administrative assistants, except legal, medical and executive	1,706,790	$47,540	$49,350
43-9041	Insurance claims and policy processing clerks	214,260	$49,230	$52,920
43-4131	Loan interviewers and clerks	164,790	$50,020	$52,520
13-2053	Insurance underwriters	105,420	$81,370	$93,700

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 national estimates.

Two things stand out. First, the spread across the clerical roles is narrow — about $6,000 between the lowest median and the highest. A lender deciding which function to staff first is not choosing between a cheap seat and an expensive one; it is choosing between functions with roughly the same labor price and very different revenue consequences. Second, underwriting is the outlier. An insurance underwriter's median is $81,370, roughly 73% above a collector's, which is why verification and document work is so often split away from underwriting judgment rather than handed to the same person.

The 2025-35 outlook: every one of these occupations shrinks

The wage data says what a seat costs today. The Occupational Outlook Handbook says what the pool behind it looks like over a decade.

Occupation	Jobs, 2025	Change, 2025-35	Employment change	Projected openings a year
Bill and account collectors	160,200	-10%	-16,700	~11,200
Customer service representatives	2,666,000	-5%	-141,800	~289,500
Bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks	1,532,400	-6%	-85,600	~144,100
Financial clerks (incl. loan and insurance clerks)	1,144,900	-4%	-45,400	~88,000

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, projections 2025-35.

A note on precision, because the two tables above will not reconcile and should not be forced to. The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program counts 158,830 collectors in May 2025; the Employment Projections program that feeds the Handbook puts the 2025 base at 160,200. The same gap appears for insurance claims and policy processing clerks: 214,260 against 239,100. These are different programs with different methods and different reference concepts, and the honest reading is that the collector workforce is "about 160,000," not a number carried to the last digit across both sources.

Why a declining occupation is not an easy one to hire into

The instinct on reading "-10%" is that hiring gets easier. The Handbook's own text says otherwise. For collectors, the Bureau writes that "about 11,200 openings for bill and account collectors are projected each year, on average, over the decade" and that "all of those openings are expected to result from the need to replace workers who transfer to other occupations or exit the labor force, such as to retire."

Read that carefully. Against the Handbook's count of 160,200 jobs in 2025, that is about one opening a year for every fourteen positions, and none of those openings come from growth. Every one of those 11,200 seats is a seat somebody left. A finance company posting a collector role is not competing for new entrants to a growing field; it is competing with hospital billing offices, utilities, card issuers and other lenders for people already leaving the work.

The reason the Bureau gives for the decline matters too, because it is the same lever operators are being sold: "Continued use of enhanced software and automated calling systems is expected to increase productivity and allow collectors to handle more accounts." That is a statement about attempts, not about conversations. A dialer places attempts faster than a person can hold conversations, and the constraint on a servicing floor is right-party contacts and the documented outcomes that follow them. Automation moves the constraint; it does not remove it.

What a wage leaves out

None of the figures above is a cost. They are wages — what the employee receives, before the employer's share of payroll taxes, health and retirement benefits, recruiting, onboarding, training to competence, telephony and licenses, workspace and the supervisor who manages the team. The Bureau is explicit that its wage estimates are wages.

The figure a staffing decision actually turns on is fully loaded cost against productive hours delivered, and it is different for every operation: a floor running 70% occupancy is a different number from one running 45%, and a role with four months to competence is different from one with four weeks. That is why this site does not publish a per-seat comparison. Any vendor that quotes you one without knowing your occupancy, your ramp and your attrition is quoting you their own arithmetic, not yours. Our guide to what outsourced collections costs sets out the structure of the comparison without pretending to know your inputs, and the in-house versus outsourced guide walks the same question for a BHPH operation.

An illustrative operating example

The example is illustrative and uses round numbers. It is not a client result, and no TEKS performance figure appears anywhere in it.

A finance company servicing 15,000 active auto accounts decides to add early-stage contact capacity. It wants four more collectors. At the May 2025 median of $47,030, the wage line is about $188,000. The plan that goes to the CFO says $188,000.

What happens next is where the plan meets the labor market. Four hires drawn from an occupation with roughly 11,200 national openings a year, all of them replacements, take longer to source than the plan assumed. Two of the four leave within the first year, and the roles are re-recruited and retrained. The seats sit empty for part of the year, so the capacity the plan bought is not the capacity the floor got. Meanwhile the delinquency flow the hires were meant to absorb did not wait: the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports an annualized 3.00% of auto loan balances flowing into 90-day-plus delinquency as of the second quarter of 2026, up from 2.93% a year earlier.

The lesson is not that hiring is wrong. It is that a headcount plan priced from a median wage and silent about sourcing time, ramp and attrition is a wage forecast, not a capacity plan. The three honest options are to hire and staff the plan for churn, to automate the earliest stage and accept that automation reaches attempts rather than conversations, or to add a dedicated team that is not drawn from the same pool.

What operators say

We do not put words in customers' mouths, so the quotations here come from the institutions that published the underlying data.

On the labor side, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is unusually direct about where collector openings come from: "All of those openings are expected to result from the need to replace workers who transfer to other occupations or exit the labor force, such as to retire," per the Occupational Outlook Handbook.

On the demand side, Joelle Scally, Economic Policy Advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, described the second quarter of 2026 this way in the August 11, 2026 release: "Delinquency rates across most products have held steady over the past two years. Still, new delinquencies for auto loans and credit cards remain at elevated levels, a trend we'll continue to monitor."

Put the two together and you have the planning problem in one line: elevated, persistent workload arriving against a shrinking domestic pool of the people who handle it.

How a dedicated team changes the arithmetic

A dedicated nearshore team does not compete for the 11,200 collector openings, because it is not staffed from that occupation's labor market. TEKS staffs bilingual agents in the Monterrey metropolitan area who work U.S. Central business hours inside the client's own systems, under the client's name and scripts, with account management in Arlington, Texas. Managers see attempts, promises to pay and outcomes in the platform they already use; there is no parallel database and no export.

Every program runs to Regulation F's operating standards — the call-frequency presumption at 12 CFR §1006.14(b)(2), the time-of-day windows in the consumer's own time zone, cease requests logged on receipt — regardless of how a given engagement is classified. That classification is determined with the client's counsel, not by a vendor. The collections and accounts receivable support page describes how those controls are configured, and the automotive finance collections program page describes the shape of a typical lender engagement.

We publish no right-party-contact, cure or roll-rate figures for client programs. Those require a documented methodology, a measurement window and the client's consent, and until a program meets all three its results stay in the client's reporting.

Frequently asked questions

What is the median wage for a bill and account collector?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a median annual wage of $47,030 for bill and account collectors in its May 2025 national estimates, with a mean of $49,060. That is a wage, not an employer cost: it excludes payroll taxes, benefits, recruiting, training, telephony, workspace and management.

Is the collections workforce growing or shrinking?

Shrinking. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment of bill and account collectors to fall 10 percent between 2025 and 2035, a decline of about 16,700 jobs, which it attributes to enhanced software and automated calling systems letting each collector handle more accounts.

If the occupation is shrinking, why is it still hard to hire collectors?

Because the openings are replacement openings. BLS projects about 11,200 collector openings a year over the decade and states that all of them are expected to come from replacing workers who move to other occupations or leave the labor force. Against the Handbook's 2025 count of 160,200 jobs, that is about one opening a year for every fourteen positions, and every one of those openings is a seat somebody left rather than a new job.

How much does a customer service representative cost compared with a collector?

The May 2025 median annual wage was $44,770 for customer service representatives and $47,030 for bill and account collectors — a difference of about $2,260. Across the clerical back-office roles the spread is narrow, roughly $6,000 between the lowest and highest median, so the choice between functions is rarely a choice about labor price.

Why do the BLS employment numbers differ between the two tables?

They come from two different programs. Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics surveys employers and reported 158,830 collectors in May 2025; the Employment Projections program behind the Occupational Outlook Handbook uses a 2025 base of 160,200. The methods and reference concepts differ, so the figures should be read as "about 160,000" rather than reconciled.

Does a nearshore team draw on the same labor pool?

No. A dedicated team staffed in the Monterrey metropolitan area is hired from a different labor market entirely, so adding capacity there does not compete with U.S. employers for the same replacement openings. It is one of three ways to close a capacity gap, alongside hiring domestically and automating the earliest stage of contact.

The bottom line

The 2026 vintage of federal labor data tells a consistent story for anyone staffing a lender's back office. Wages for the clerical roles cluster within a few thousand dollars of each other around the high forties. Every one of those occupations is projected to shrink over the next decade. And every one of them still has openings to fill, because the people who leave have to be replaced.

An operator planning capacity from a median wage alone is planning from the one number in the dataset that says least about whether the seats will be filled. Price the plan for sourcing time, ramp and attrition; decide deliberately which of the three levers — hire, automate, add a dedicated team — you are pulling and why; and keep the compliance floor in your systems rather than in your scripts. If a dedicated bilingual team working inside your platform is one of the options you want to price properly, tell us about your portfolio and you will get a straight answer on fit.