About the paper
CIPR’s State of the Profession 2026 is original survey research on working conditions, activities, AI use, recruitment, pay, professional challenges, polarisation and inclusion in public relations.
Chalkstream conducted an online survey for CIPR from 13 April to 4 May 2026, receiving 738 responses, of which 573 were complete; 88% of respondents were UK-based and 12% were based outside the UK.
The 2026 sample is older, more senior and contains more agency, consultancy and independent practitioners than previous waves, so year-on-year comparisons, particularly on income, activities and AI, should be treated with caution.
Length: 75 pages
More information/download: https://newsroom.cipr.co.uk/organisations-more-cautious-about-taking-public-positions-compared-to-five-years-ago-ciprs-2026-state-of-the-profession-report-reveals/
Core Insights
1. What overall picture does the report paint of the PR profession in 2026?
The central picture is not of a profession moving uniformly in one direction, but of one experiencing the same pressures very differently depending on sector, seniority, age and geography.
Employment conditions illustrate this split clearly. Agencies and consultancies appear comparatively buoyant: 49% say they are growing, up from 38% in 2024. In-house teams look much weaker, with only 21% reporting growth, down from 33%, while 65% describe their teams as stable and 13% as shrinking. Confidence in future growth is correspondingly low. Among in-house respondents, 42% are not at all confident that their team will grow over the next 12 months, rising to 46% in the public sector.
The profession’s day-to-day work combines continuity with some movement towards more strategic responsibilities. Copywriting and editing remains the most commonly reported activity, cited by 52% of practitioners, as it has been throughout the series since at least 2018. Strategic planning has moved into second place at 41%, followed by PR programmes and campaigns at 38%, community and stakeholder relations and media relations at 36% each. The report cautions, however, that the apparent rise of strategic planning may partly reflect the more senior 2026 sample.
The perceived challenges facing the profession have also shifted. Fake news and disinformation is now the most commonly identified challenge, cited by 54%, replacing AI, which falls to second place at 49%. The expanding skill set expected of individual practitioners comes third at 39%. Concerns about professional status have also re-emerged: 34% cite PR not being seen as a professional discipline, returning the issue to the top five.
Taken together, the report portrays a profession whose traditional work has not disappeared, but whose operating environment has become more difficult. Practitioners are simultaneously dealing with technological change, disinformation, expanding skills expectations, polarised public debate and uneven organisational investment in communication.
2. What does the study reveal about the adoption of AI, and where are the largest gaps between use, confidence and governance?
AI has become a normal part of professional practice, but the report finds a striking gap between widespread adoption and much more ambivalent attitudes towards its value.
Eighty-two percent of practitioners use AI at least occasionally for work. Regular use remains unchanged from 2024 at 45%, but occasional use has risen from 28% to 37%, while the proportion saying they have never used AI has fallen from 8% to just 3%. Use is therefore close to universal, even though intensive use has not increased.
Practitioners also report substantial practical benefits. Eighty-six percent say AI has improved the speed with which they complete tasks, and 75% say it has improved their ability to concentrate on higher-value or more strategic work. The evidence is more mixed when it comes to quality: 55% report a positive effect on the quality of their work, 48% on consistency and personalisation, and only 37% on the quality of decision-making.
The attitudes data reveals an important tension. Seventy-one percent feel confident in their ability to adapt to AI-related changes, and 81% believe the skills that make PR professionals valuable cannot be replicated by AI. Yet only 47% believe AI will improve the overall quality of PR work. Thirty-four per cent regard AI as a threat to the profession, while 76% believe AI-generated content risks damaging trust in public relations.
Governance has not fully caught up with adoption. Although 66% say their organisation has an AI policy, 24% of users report having no formal policy or guidance on which tools may be used. A third say they have used unapproved AI tools at work. Sixty percent have received AI training.
There is also a weak link between organisations and their external suppliers. Among in-house practitioners who use agencies or independents, half have never asked them about their use of AI. Looking from the supplier side, 49% of agencies and independents say clients have not asked them about AI use at all, while only 5% say most or all clients ask.
Sector differences are pronounced. Private-sector and agency practitioners tend to be the most positive and confident about AI. The public sector has the strongest policy and training structures: 79% report an organisational AI policy and 67% have received training. Not-for-profit and NGO practitioners appear comparatively exposed, with lower confidence, weaker policy coverage and greater concern about AI as a threat.
The report therefore suggests that PR has moved beyond the question of whether AI will be adopted. The more important issue is now whether organisations can develop governance, skills and professional standards quickly enough to match the level of actual use.
3. What does the report say about employment, recruitment and income, and how reliable are the apparent changes?
The labour-market findings point to a growing divide between agencies and in-house communication functions.
Nearly half of agencies and consultancies report that they are growing, compared with just over one-fifth of in-house teams. Agency respondents are also substantially more optimistic about the future: 46% are moderately or extremely confident that their organisation will grow over the next year, compared with only 21% of in-house practitioners.
The differences are sharpest in the public sector. Forty-six percent of public-sector respondents are not at all confident about team growth over the next 12 months, compared with 34% in the private sector and 44% in not-for-profits and NGOs.
The survey also finds changes in working patterns. Thirteen percent of respondents work part-time, compared with 7% in 2024. CIPR cautions against interpreting this as evidence of a profession-wide move towards part-time employment because independent practitioners, who are particularly likely to work part-time, make up a larger share of the 2026 sample.
The same caveat matters considerably for salaries. Average full-time income is reported at £64,817, 22% above the 2024 figure of £53,052 and the highest recorded in the series. But the report explicitly attributes much of this rise to the greater seniority of the 2026 respondents. Directors, partners, founders and managing directors average £102,887, compared with £69,930 for heads of communication and associate directors, £56,311 for managers and £38,774 for interns, trainees, assistants and executives. A sample containing more senior practitioners will therefore mechanically produce a higher overall average.
Organisation type also matters. Private-sector in-house practitioners report the highest average full-time income at £74,419, followed by agency and consultancy practitioners at £68,675 and independents at £66,900. Public-sector practitioners average £59,156 and not-for-profit and NGO practitioners £56,714.
The estimated gender pay gap remains unresolved. After controlling statistically for age and seniority, the report calculates a gap of £5,539, compared with £3,894 in 2024. The 2026 estimate falls just short of statistical significance because fewer respondents provided income data, so the apparent increase should not be treated as definitive. The report’s more defensible conclusion is that there is no evidence that the gap has disappeared or clearly narrowed.
Recruitment also contains a diversity concern. Among senior in-house respondents involved in recruitment, non-White practitioners are less likely than White practitioners to participate in recruitment decisions, 59% compared with 70%. The same pattern appeared in the 2022 and 2024 studies, making it more than a one-year anomaly within this survey series.
4. How is growing social and political polarisation affecting the work and responsibilities of PR practitioners?
This is one of the report’s most distinctive additions. For the first time, the State of the Profession study includes a substantial section specifically devoted to polarisation and controversial issues.
The findings suggest that dealing with contested issues is increasingly becoming part of normal PR work. Sixty-four percent say navigating polarised opinions is becoming a larger part of their job, while 54% say polarisation in society has made their work more difficult. Ninety-one percent regard keeping up with current affairs as necessary for their job, yet 38% say doing so negatively affects their mental health.
Personal and professional views also regularly come into conflict. Forty-three percent say they are sometimes asked to communicate messages with which they personally disagree, although 59% believe representing views one may personally disagree with is part of the professional role.
More broadly, 82% say they encounter ethically or politically difficult topics at least occasionally: 40% rarely, 28% sometimes, 9% often and 4% very often. Younger practitioners report such experiences considerably more frequently. Among those aged 16–34, 53% say they encounter them sometimes, often or very often, compared with 21% among those aged 55 and over. The report explicitly says it cannot determine whether this reflects differences in the work given to younger employees or differences in the attitudes of the generations themselves.
These issues are not merely theoretical. Practitioners report changing employment or client decisions because of organisations’ positions on social, political or ethical issues. Thirty percent have raised concerns internally about an employer’s stance, 24% have started looking for another job, and 22% have decided not to apply for a job they would otherwise have considered. On the agency and consultancy side, 39% have decided not to pitch for work because of a potential client’s position, 37% have declined a client or project and 22% have ended or attempted to end a client relationship.
Organisations themselves appear to have become more cautious. Fifty-two percent of respondents say their organisation is more reluctant to take public positions than five years ago, while 48% believe the risks of taking positions on controversial issues outweigh the benefits. At the same time, 47% say organisations face greater pressure to comment, and 46% say employees increasingly expect them to take positions.
The crucial governance finding is that fewer than half have meaningful organisational guidance. Only 21% report a formal policy on controversial issues and another 24% informal guidance; 39% have neither.
When asked what would help, the most popular answer is not communications training. Sixty-one per cent want senior leadership to take responsibility for decisions on controversial issues, ahead of training in navigating polarised audiences at 53% and clearer organisational policy at 52%.
The implication is that polarisation is increasingly a corporate governance issue rather than simply a communication challenge. Practitioners appear to be asking senior leaders to make the fundamental decisions about whether an organisation should speak, remain silent or take a particular position, rather than leaving communicators to carry that responsibility themselves.
5. What does the study show about diversity and inclusion, and where are the tensions between the profession’s overall picture and individual experiences?
The headline picture of workplace inclusion is comparatively positive, but the aggregate figure conceals substantial differences between groups.
Sixty-eight percent of respondents describe their work environment as very or extremely inclusive, including 29% who call it extremely inclusive. Only 8% describe their workplace as not at all or only slightly inclusive.
Organisation type matters considerably. Eighty-one percent of agency and consultancy respondents describe their workplace as very or extremely inclusive, compared with 62% in private-sector in-house teams, 61% in the public sector and 67% in not-for-profit organisations and NGOs.
The most significant difference, however, concerns ethnicity. Among White respondents, 72% describe their workplace as very or extremely inclusive and only 5% as not at all or slightly inclusive. Among non-White respondents, the corresponding figures are 57% and 18%. Non-White practitioners are therefore more than three times as likely to report low workplace inclusivity.
Representation also changes markedly with seniority. White respondents account for 58% of interns, trainees, assistants and executives, but their proportion rises progressively to 87% among directors, partners and managing directors. The report notes that this pattern has appeared in the data for several years.
At the same time, diversity itself has fallen as a perceived industry challenge. Only 17% now identify lack of diversity among PR practitioners as one of the profession’s major challenges, placing it tenth, compared with fifth in 2024. This creates an important tension within the findings: concern about diversity has declined among practitioners as a whole even though the data continues to show substantial differences in representation, recruitment involvement and perceived inclusion.
The report also broadens the diversity picture beyond ethnicity and gender. Fourteen percent of respondents report a long-term physical or mental health condition affecting their daily activities, while 16% identify as neurodivergent. Both figures vary considerably by employment type. Nineteen percent of independent practitioners identify as having a disability and 32% as neurodivergent, compared with 6% and 12% respectively among agency and consultancy respondents. The report does not establish why independent practice attracts or accommodates these groups at higher rates, so causal interpretations would go beyond the evidence.
Overall, the report suggests that the profession should be cautious about treating a generally positive average assessment of inclusion as evidence that inclusion problems have been resolved. The experience of the average respondent is not necessarily the experience of practitioners from less well represented groups, and some of the strongest inequalities become visible only when the data is broken down by ethnicity, seniority or organisation type.