Writing Careers: Jobs, Pay, Skills & How AI Is Changing the Work

By Chris Gaglardi
| Last Updated September 1, 2026

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If you want to make writing a central part of your career, the useful question is no longer simply, “What jobs can writers get?”

A better question is: What else can you do well besides write?

Professional writing increasingly overlaps with technical knowledge, research, reporting, marketing strategy, product design, regulatory work, fundraising, and organizational communications. Generative AI can now handle a growing share of routine drafting, summarizing, rewriting, and versioning. That does not mean writing careers are disappearing. It does mean that being able to produce clean prose is less of a moat than it used to be.

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Writing Careers Compared

The pay figures below are federal occupational benchmarks, not promises for every job title within a career family. That distinction matters. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) collects wages for broad occupations, not every title an employer might put on a job posting.

BLS wage figures are May 2025 medians. Employment projections cover 2025–2035. Niche titles without a direct BLS occupation are intentionally not assigned a fake salary.

1. Technical and Documentation Writing

Technical writing is one of the clearest examples of writing becoming more valuable when it is paired with another kind of expertise.

Technical writers create instructions, support documents, product information, procedures, and other materials that help people understand complex systems. BLS says they may study product samples, talk with designers and developers, work with technical staff, incorporate diagrams and multimedia, collect user feedback, and participate in usability work. O*NET likewise describes work involving technical standards, specifications, research, collaboration, and interviews with subject-matter experts.

The May 2025 median annual wage for Technical Writers was $90,390. BLS projects employment to grow 1% from 2025 to 2035, adding about 400 jobs on net, with roughly 3,200 openings per year from growth and replacement needs. BLS also says AI-driven productivity may slow employment growth.

This path can fit people who like writing but also enjoy figuring out how things work. A bachelor's degree is typical according to BLS, and technical knowledge or experience in engineering, science, information technology, or another relevant field can improve your fit for particular roles.

A useful portfolio may include procedures, tutorials, troubleshooting guides, documentation for a public or personal project, or contributions to open-source documentation. What matters is showing that you can organize complicated information for a real user, not merely that you can write attractive paragraphs.

2. Proposal, RFP, and Grant Writing

Proposal and grant writing sit in an awkward spot in federal labor data because the titles cross occupational boundaries.

O*NET currently lists Grant Writer among reported titles for Technical Writers, while its Fundraisers occupation includes titles such as Contract Grant Writer and Grant Coordinator. That tells us something useful: “grant writer” does not describe one nationally standardized occupation with one defensible salary. The work can lean toward technical documentation, institutional fundraising, business development, or some combination of them.

For fundraising-oriented work, BLS reports a May 2025 median annual wage of $72,550 for Fundraisers and projects 6% employment growth from 2025 to 2035, with about 10,000 openings per year. That number is a benchmark for the broader fundraising occupation, not a “grant writer salary.”

Proposal writers may work on commercial bids, government RFPs, technical proposals, and other documents where responding correctly to requirements matters as much as polished prose. AI can help with boilerplate, summaries, first drafts, or reusing approved material. The harder work is understanding the opportunity, extracting information from internal experts, identifying requirements, preserving consistency across a large response, supporting claims with evidence, and making sure the final package actually answers what the buyer or funder asked.

This path can suit writers who enjoy research, deadlines, structured requirements, and persuasive business writing more than open-ended creative work.

3. Copywriting, Content, and Marketing Writing

Advertising copywriters, content marketing writers, SEO copywriters, web content writers, and similar titles are grouped by O*NET under Writers and Authors. The occupation's tasks include client discussions, market research, interviews, campaign development, adapting tone to different audiences, and collaboration with sales and marketing staff.

That broader job is more durable than “generate 1,200 words about a keyword.”

BLS reports a May 2025 median annual wage of $76,910 for Writers and Authors. Employment is projected to round to 0% growth between 2025 and 2035, although the underlying projection decreases by roughly 500 jobs. BLS specifically says increasing AI use for writing is expected to dampen demand.

Commodity content production is therefore a weak place to build your entire professional identity. AI is already well suited to drafting, rewriting, summarizing, and producing variations. But marketing writing also includes activities that depend on audience insight, research, positioning, campaign objectives, brand judgment, collaboration, and measurement.

The useful career move is not to compete with software on who can generate more acceptable sentences per hour. It is to become the writer who understands why the organization is communicating, who needs to respond, what evidence supports the message, and how the result will be evaluated.

If your interests extend beyond writing into campaign strategy, analytics, market research, or broader marketing operations, see our guide to marketing careers.

4. UX Writing and Content Design

UX writing and content design are writing-heavy roles inside digital products and services.

The work may include interface labels, instructions, error messages, onboarding flows, help content, information architecture, content patterns, and decisions about when text should appear at all. But reducing the profession to “writing button labels” misses most of the interesting part.

Strong content design depends on understanding users, product constraints, accessibility, research findings, and the behavior of an entire flow. It often involves working with designers, researchers, product managers, engineers, and legal or policy teams.

There is no dedicated BLS national wage series for UX writers or content designers, so this guide does not assign them a made-up salary. O*NET currently includes UX Writer among reported Technical Writer titles, but the broader Technical Writers median is not automatically a UX-writer salary.

AI can generate dozens of interface-text alternatives almost instantly. What it does not automatically possess is the organization's product context, research history, edge cases, accessibility decisions, technical constraints, or authority to decide which option solves the user's problem.

For this career path, a portfolio is often more useful when it explains the problem, constraints, research, iterations, and reasoning behind the final content than when it simply displays polished screens.

5. Journalism and Editorial Careers

Journalism is a particularly bad career to describe as “getting paid to write articles.”

BLS says reporters and journalists research assigned topics, develop relationships with sources, conduct interviews, analyze information, investigate story ideas, verify accuracy, update developing stories, and increasingly work across multiple media formats. Multimedia journalists may report, record, write, edit, and gather graphics or video themselves.

The economic picture is difficult. The May 2025 median annual wage for News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists was $62,200, and BLS projects employment to fall 6% from 2025 to 2035. About 3,400 openings per year are still expected, primarily because existing workers leave the occupation.

Editing has its own labor market. Editors earned a median annual wage of $77,920 in May 2025, and employment is projected to decline 1%, with roughly 7,900 openings each year. Their work extends beyond proofreading. BLS describes fact verification, evaluating submissions, developing ideas, working with writers, making publication decisions, and in some cases confirming sources, dates, and statistics.

BLS currently attributes the projected decline in some editing jobs to traditional print newspapers and magazines losing ground to other formats. It does not attribute the projection to generative AI, so this guide does not either.

If you are considering the education side of this field, explore journalism schools and programs.

6. Public Relations and Organizational Communications

Public relations is broader than writing, but writing remains central to many PR and communications roles.

PR specialists may prepare media materials, support public messaging, monitor public opinion, coordinate communication during developing situations, and work with executives or other stakeholders. Speechwriting, media relations, internal communications, and corporate messaging can all live in this broader world.

The May 2025 median annual wage for Public Relations Specialists was $74,750. BLS projects 2% growth from 2025 to 2035 and about 23,000 openings per year. It expects organizations to continue needing people who manage reputation and respond to rapidly changing public opinion, although BLS also notes that increasing AI use in data-rich social media may soften demand.

The writing in this field may be assisted heavily by AI, especially for first drafts, media summaries, variations, or routine updates. The underlying job still depends on context that is difficult to automate: knowing which message is appropriate, understanding stakeholders, coordinating approvals, maintaining media relationships, advising leaders, and making judgment calls when a situation is moving quickly.

A bachelor's degree in public relations, communications, business, or a related field is a common route. Internships or relevant communications experience can also help. Professional credentials exist, but they are not generally entry tickets.

For program-focused information, see public relations schools and training options.

7. Specialized Professional Writing

Some of the most interesting writing careers are difficult to isolate in government salary tables because their value comes from the subject matter as much as the writing.

Examples can include medical, scientific, regulatory, financial, policy, compliance, and other technically specialized writing.

O*NET's Technical Writers occupation currently includes reported titles such as Medical Writer and Grant Writer. That makes Technical Writers a potentially useful occupation-family benchmark for some specialized roles, but not permission to call $90,390 the “medical writer salary.”

The same caution applies to education. A science, healthcare, engineering, finance, or legal background may be valuable or required for particular positions, but requirements differ too much to declare that all specialized writers need an advanced professional degree.

Medical writing illustrates this nicely. The Medical Writer Certified (MWC) credential is voluntary and aimed at experienced professionals. Current eligibility generally requires a bachelor's degree in any field plus at least two years of paid medical-writing experience. It is not a beginner credential that substitutes for experience.

The durable advantage in specialized writing is not that AI somehow stops working when the topic gets complicated. It is that mistakes become more consequential, context gets deeper, sources become harder to interpret, and somebody still needs enough expertise to recognize when an apparently fluent answer is wrong.

8. Creative Writing and Publishing

Novelists, screenwriters, ghostwriters, travel writers, critics, and other creative writers belong in a guide to writing careers, but they should not be presented as if they all have normal salaried jobs with tidy national medians.

BLS includes novelists, screenwriters, content writers, copywriters, playwrights, and speechwriters within its broader Writers and Authors discussion. Yet 65% of Writers and Authors were self-employed in 2025. Meanwhile, the OEWS program that produces the familiar $76,910 wage figure does not cover self-employed workers.

That makes “$76,910 novelist salary” a fundamentally misleading interpretation of the data.

Creative-writing income can come from employment, assignments, contracts, advances, royalties, licensing, project fees, or self-employment. The structure varies dramatically between publishing, film and television, branded entertainment, games, ghostwriting, and independent publishing.

If creative expression is your main motivation, that volatility is part of the career decision. A creative career can be rewarding, but “people get paid to write novels” is not the same economic proposition as accepting a salaried technical-writing position.

For a broader look beyond writing, see our guide to creative careers.

How AI Is Changing Writing Careers

Generative AI is unusually applicable to writing work. Microsoft researchers analyzing 200,000 anonymized Copilot conversations found that writing and information gathering were among the most common work activities for which people sought AI assistance. But the researchers later emphasized an important limitation: AI applicability is not the same as job displacement, and their study did not conclude that highly applicable occupations would disappear.

The International Labour Organization reaches a similarly nuanced conclusion. Its 2025 task-level analysis covers nearly 30,000 occupational tasks and finds that one in four workers globally is in an occupation with some exposure to generative AI. Yet because occupations contain tasks that still require human input, the ILO says job transformation is more likely than wholesale replacement. It also found rising exposure in highly digitized media- and web-related occupations as AI capabilities expanded.

BLS itself now expects AI to dampen demand for Writers and Authors and potentially slow growth for Technical Writers by making workers more productive. That is stronger evidence than either utopian “AI will free writers to be creative” claims or apocalyptic “all writers are finished” claims.

There is also a copyright wrinkle for writers using generative AI. The U.S. Copyright Office says AI-assisted work can still receive copyright protection for sufficiently human-authored expression, arrangements, or modifications. Mere prompting by itself is not enough to establish human authorship over generated output.

The practical takeaway is straightforward: learn to use useful tools, but build your career around capabilities that remain valuable when everyone else has access to the same tools.

For a broader cross-industry view, see careers that may hold up better in the AI era.

Do You Need a Degree for a Writing Career?

There is no single educational rule for all writing careers.

BLS says a bachelor's degree in English, communications, journalism, or a related field is generally required for salaried Writers and Authors positions. Technical Writers also typically need a bachelor's degree, and technical knowledge or experience can be beneficial. Journalists and PR specialists typically enter with bachelor's-level education. Editors generally need a bachelor's degree plus writing or proofreading experience.

That does not mean an English degree is the universal best choice.

If you want to write about software, engineering, healthcare, finance, public policy, or another specialized field, education or work experience in that subject may be just as important as formal writing training. A journalist needs reporting ability. A UX content designer needs to understand users and products. A copywriter benefits from marketing knowledge. A medical writer needs enough health and scientific literacy to work accurately within the type of material the job covers.

O*NET's current Writers and Authors data also illustrates why requirements vary: respondents report bachelor's degrees for some jobs, but some college or associate-level education for others.

Education should therefore be chosen around the kind of writing you want to do, not around the idea that every professional writer follows the same academic track.

• Writing schools and colleges
• Journalism schools and programs
• Public relations programs
• Marketing schools and programs

What Should Go in a Writing Portfolio?

A generic pile of your “best writing” is less useful than evidence that you can do the kind of work an employer or client actually needs.

Confidentiality can make portfolios difficult in proposal, corporate, medical, or other specialized fields. Do not violate an NDA to prove you can follow instructions. When direct samples cannot be shared, an anonymized case study, independently created sample, public-domain project, or clear explanation of your contribution may be more appropriate.

Freelance Writing Is a Business Model, Not One Career

“Freelance writer” tells you how someone gets paid. It does not tell you what they are good at.

A freelance writer could be a technical writer, medical writer, journalist, copywriter, ghostwriter, editor, grant writer, or something else entirely. That distinction matters because the economics, competition, client expectations, and portfolio needs differ sharply by specialization.

Freelancing is also common enough that employee wage statistics require extra caution. BLS says 65% of people in its Writers and Authors employment profile were self-employed in 2025, while OEWS wage estimates exclude self-employed workers. So there is no honest way to take a federal employee median and call it “average freelance writer income.”

Independent workers also need to think about expenses and taxes that an employee does not handle in the same way. The IRS says the federal self-employment tax rate for Social Security and Medicare is 15.3%, subject to applicable earnings rules and thresholds. That does not mean you can simply add 15.3% to an employee's hourly wage and declare your ideal freelance rate. Pricing also has to account for the actual services, expenses, unpaid business activity, benefits situation, market, and risk involved.

If your main question is how to build a freelance-writing business, that is a deeper topic than this career-comparison guide. Here, the important distinction is that specialization defines the work; freelancing defines the commercial relationship.

For broader self-employment ideas, see careers where you can be your own boss.

Are Writing Careers Remote?

Some are. That does not make “writer” synonymous with “remote worker.”

BLS notes that Writers and Authors may work wherever they have computer access, and improved communications technology allows many to work from a wider range of locations. Editors can also work remotely.

Other jobs have reasons to be somewhere specific. Journalists conduct interviews and report on events. Technical writers may need access to products and development teams. UX content designers work closely with product groups. PR professionals attend meetings, events, and community activities. Specialized writers may work under organizational security or compliance constraints.

If remote work is your primary goal rather than writing itself, compare careers based on actual employer practices instead of assuming that a laptop automatically guarantees a work-from-home job. See our dedicated guide to work-from-home careers.

Which Writing Career Is Right for You?

The strongest choice usually comes from the intersection of what you like to write, what else you know, and how you want to work.

• You like complicated systems: technical and documentation writing may fit better than general content work.
• You like persuasion plus strict requirements: proposals, RFPs, or grants may be a better match.
• You care about customers and commercial results: copywriting can lead naturally into broader content or marketing strategy.
• You enjoy research, interviewing, and public-interest work: journalism offers a very different day-to-day reality from sitting alone drafting copy.
• You already have scientific, technical, financial, legal, or policy expertise: combining that knowledge with communication skill can create a narrower, more defensible niche.
• Creative expression is the priority: publishing, screenwriting, and other creative paths may offer more artistic freedom but generally come with less predictable income.

The common thread is that writing ability still matters, but writing ability alone is not much of a career strategy.

The writers with the clearest professional value increasingly know how to investigate, explain, persuade, verify, collaborate, or make complex information useful. AI can participate in many of those workflows. It does not make those other capabilities optional.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources and Methodology

Labor-market figures use May 2025 BLS wage data and 2025–2035 employment projections current as of September 1, 2026. Niche job titles are not assigned an occupation-level median unless the mapping is defensible. AI exposure is discussed at the task level rather than presented as a probability of job elimination.

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Media and Communication Occupations
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Technical Writers
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Writers and Authors
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Editors
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Public Relations Specialists
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Fundraisers
• O*NET OnLine: Technical Writers and Writers and Authors
• International Labour Organization: Generative AI and Jobs: A Refined Global Index of Occupational Exposure
• Microsoft Research: Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI
• U.S. Copyright Office: Copyright and Artificial Intelligence
• Internal Revenue Service: Self-Employment Tax
• American Medical Writers Association: Medical Writer Certified credential

Explore Education Options for Writing and Communication Careers

If you want structured training, start with the career family you are actually considering rather than choosing a generic writing program by default. Communications, journalism, public relations, marketing, and technical or subject-specific education can lead to very different kinds of work.

• Writing Schools and Colleges
• Journalism Schools
• Public Relations Programs
• Marketing Programs