Last year I was chatting with someone in the industry who runs a midsize trade brand when we reached an embarrassing hiccup in the conversation. We had been marveling about how big the design world has gotten over the past decade—and we realized that, truth be told, neither of us knew exactly how big.
“I mean, there are 60,000 … 75,000 designers?” they said, half-asking.
“Yeah, it’s … I don’t know,” I replied sheepishly.
Admittedly, the exact number of interior designers in America is not a fact that most people have on the tip of their tongue. But I found it slightly strange that neither this person, whose job it is to sell to designers, nor I, whose job it is to write for designers, knew it offhand. Since then, I’ve made a point of casually asking other people in the industry what they think the number might be. I’ve heard anywhere from 30,000 to 150,000—quite the range! If nothing else, it was reassuring that I wasn’t alone in my ignorance.
But the puzzle remained: How many interior designers are there?
The question leads to, if not a simple answer, a simple place to start looking: the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the government agency tasked with collecting and sharing information about employment in the U.S. The BLS, like MRI machines and nuclear physics, is something I am glad exists, but am happy not to interact with often. Its site is a dizzying web of acronyms and charts—a data wonk’s paradise, but hell for an English major. Want to know how many female vending machine operators were employed in February of 2016? Get ready to spend a few hours digging through the darker corners of BLS.gov. (By the way, it’s 12,000.)
The BLS does have an answer to how many designers are working in the U.S.—actually, it has three. The agency’s Current Employment Statistics (CES) database pegs the number at 54,000 jobs as of April 2024; its Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program puts it at 67,760 as of May 2023; and its Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH) suggests there were 94,900 interior designer jobs in the country as of 2022. A casual reader might walk away confused: Is it 50 grand, or nearly double that?
In fairness, much of the wild disparity between those three numbers comes from the fact that each of these studies has its own methodology: CES looks at payroll data from employers, while OOH is a broader overview that includes economic projections. Crucially, CES and OEWS exclude the self-employed. In an industry full of one-person firms, that’s a lot of designers—which helps explain the huge gap between the agency’s lowest and highest estimates. The most comprehensive total number is probably the 94,900 figure from a couple years ago.
Underlying these black-and-white data points is a slightly grayer reality. The BLS relies on a series of surveys to get raw numbers, then applies data science to extrapolate takeaways about the broader economy. Its numbers are rigorously calculated, but they are still estimates—the agency isn’t taking attendance at High Point Market or knocking on every door in America asking to see resale licenses.
From that uncertainty comes speculation that the true number might be either lower or higher than BLS data. For example, in its 2023 state-of-the-industry report, the American Society of Interior Designers suggested that, while the CES data was citing 54,700 payrolled design jobs, the total number—including self-employed designers—could be 123,000 or more.
To get to that number, ASID cited both the BLS and a study by an independent company, Barnes Reports, which conducts research and publishes forecasts on various industries. The firm doesn’t give away its data for free (a single industry report can run up to $2,500), and it didn’t respond to a request for comment. But whatever Barnes’s methodology, ASID is hardly alone in estimating that the real number of designers might blow past 100,000—a quick Google search shows market research sites like IBISWorld estimating that there may be more than 152,000 designers in America.
The assumption that the BLS might be undercounting the number of designers is something I heard from a variety of industry sources. The general line of thinking is that in the social media age, where you can spin up a design business with an Instagram account and not much more, the barrier to entry is so low that there must be thousands of designers who are flying under the radar. It’s possible, but difficult to prove one way or the other—until the agency starts tracking hashtags.
Another challenge of parsing the data is the fluidity of the term interior designer. The BLS, for example, doesn’t distinguish between commercial and residential designers. Neither does ASID in its 2023 report. In general, the government’s data is quite broad: It encompasses everything from a designer working at a small furniture store to one overseeing a corporate hospitality chain.
Even if you take the 94,900 number as gospel, there’s no question that the number of residential designers—the kind you’ll often see featured in Business of Home—is only one slice of that pie.
If you’ve made your way through this many acronyms and numbers, you might be wondering whether it really matters how many designers there are in America. It’s a fair question. As I researched this article, I found myself asking another one:
Who does it matter to, and why?
Because there is no single answer, the number someone chooses to use often tells you something about the person citing it. For entrepreneurs pitching investors on a design industry business, there’s a tendency to highlight a knockout figure at the upper reaches of what’s possible—after all, the more designers, the bigger the opportunity. Behind the scenes, businesspeople making blunt economic decisions tend to be more conservative. In off-the-record exchanges with a handful of executives at residential trade brands, most told me they see the number at closer to 60,000 than 120,000.
In short: If someone tells you it’s 150,000 and up, they’re a dreamer or they’re trying to sell something. If someone tells you it’s 30,000, they might be having a bad day.
For individual designers, the number may feel totally abstract. What does it matter if there are 60,000 designers or 100,000 in America? If anything, a higher estimate might feel a little unsettling. It’s a sentiment I’ve encountered more than a few times: that the industry is becoming flooded with dilettantes who are ruining it for everyone else.
Though the data may not be precise about the exact number of interior designers in the country, it is crystal clear on one thing: The American interior design industry is growing. ASID’s report—largely derived from BLS numbers—suggests that the amount of designers has roughly doubled over the course of the past decade and continues to grow at a steady clip. The OOH pegs industry growth at roughly 4 percent annually.
For designers already in business, more newcomers may seem like a bad thing. But an expanding industry is rarely one where a growing number of people fight over the same slice of pie. More often, the pie is growing too.
And the fact that the design industry has gotten bigger is likely a win for designers in the final analysis. For one, more designers means more buying power, which means more brands of all stripes are eager to cater to the trade. High Point Market is a case in point: In the not-too-distant past, its showrooms would shun designers. Now, they’re welcomed with open arms, cocktail parties and stocking-dealer pricing. All of that is the by-product of a fast-expanding industry.
There’s also a cultural upside. It used to be a common pain point that prospective clients had absolutely no idea what an interior designer did, how their services worked or where the value lay. To be sure, designers continue to experience some version of that problem, but I hear it less with each passing year. This is no longer an ultraniche profession known only to the ultrarich—it’s simply a job that a lot of people have. There’s strength in numbers.
