Event Planner

Also known as: Event Coordinator, Wedding Planner, Meeting Planner, Conference Planner

Entertainment & GamingBachelor's DegreeModerate Growth

Organize conferences, weddings, festivals, and corporate events, managing every detail from start to finish.

Salary Range

Entry Level

$38K

Starting salary

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Top Level

$215K

Top salary

VP Events (Major Brand)

The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for event planners.

About 1 in 833 reaches this level

Of ~172,100 meeting/convention/event planners (BLS Employment Projections, SOC 13-1121, 2025), only ~200 are VP-Events at major brands paying $215K — about 0.12%.

Salary data based on 2025 BLS, Glassdoor, and industry reports. Actual compensation varies by location, experience, and employer.

How to Become One

This career typically requires a bachelor's degree. Here are the top colleges for it:

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Cost to Qualify

Bachelor's degree (4 years)

4 years after school

$56,454

Tuition and required fees. Living costs are not included

Four years of tuition and required fees runs about $56K at a typical public college in our list (in-state) and about $288K at a typical private one. Both are pricier than the US national averages (about $48K public in-state, $180K private nonprofit, College Board 2025-26) because our 161-college dataset only includes nationally-ranked schools, not every US college. This excludes room and board, which we show separately on each college's page.

↗College Board, Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2025 (PDF) - 2025-26 average published tuition and fees: public four-year in-state $11,950, private nonprofit four-year $45,000 (the national averages our note quotes as about $48K and $180K over four years)

Sticker price, not what most people pay — scholarships, aid and in-state status all move it. Room and board is shown separately on each college's page.

AI Risk Assessment

Moderate Risk (Level 3/5)How we score ›

Event planners organize conferences, weddings, festivals and company events: finding venues, negotiating with vendors, managing budgets and schedules, and running the day itself. The planning side is office work that AI is starting to take on. Skift Meetings, a trade publication, wrote in 2025 that "AI-driven automation tools are rapidly absorbing repetitive administrative work" such as venue contracts, vendor coordination, transportation, hotel room blocks and food orders. In a small 2025 survey of 92 business-events professionals run by PCMA, the meeting planners' association, 91% said they use AI in some way, most often to create and summarize content (46%). Only 18% were using it for planning and logistics yet.

The day itself stays human: fixing problems as they happen, managing vendors and crowds on site, and keeping the client happy. Demand is solid. BLS projects meeting, convention and event planner jobs to grow 6% from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all jobs, with about 16,800 openings a year, from both personal events like weddings and business meetings. A 2025 Microsoft Research study of how much of each job's tasks AI chatbots can help with put event planners in the middle of 785 jobs (379th).

We rate this a 3, a notch above what those numbers alone suggest. Our reason: the booking, comparing and paperwork AI is absorbing is much of what assistant and junior planners do, so the entry level is where we expect the squeeze. That is our judgment; we have not yet seen data showing fewer junior planners being hired.

What would change this score. If event companies and corporate event teams keep hiring junior planners at the pace BLS projects while AI tools spread, this comes down to 2. If one planner with AI tools starts doing the work of a small team and assistant roles disappear, it goes to 4.