A PR team earns and protects the coverage a company gets from journalists, analysts and podcasts. In practice most companies do not need a team — they need one good person plus a decision about what to outsource. The first hire should be a generalist who can write a pitch and hold a media relationship; everything else can wait or be bought. This page covers the roles, the order to hire them, what each costs, and when an agency is the better answer.
Google will summarise the definition above the results for this question. What follows is the part a summary cannot give you: the hiring sequence and the trade-offs.
What a PR team actually does
Four jobs, in descending order of how much they matter.
Targeting. Deciding which journalists could plausibly care and confirming they still cover the beat. Where programmes are won and lost, and the least glamorous work in the function.
Pitching. Writing the email that gets a reply, usually under 150 words.
Managing the story. Once a reporter is interested: supplying the spokesperson, the data, the customer, the fact-check turnaround — before the story moves without you.
Everything else. Press releases, awards, speaking, analyst relations, messaging, crisis preparation. Real work, none of it the reason the function exists.
The hiring order
Hire 1 — a generalist who can write and hold relationships. Someone who can research a list, write a pitch a journalist replies to, and run an interview without supervision. Title varies; the capability does not. Do not hire a strategist first. Strategy without execution produces documents.
Hire 2 — depends entirely on what is breaking. If the first person is drowning in coordination, hire operations. If they are producing coverage but nobody can measure it, hire analytics or fix the recording. If demand exceeds one person's output, hire another generalist.
Hire 3 — specialist by channel. Analyst relations, executive communications, or content, depending on where your buyers actually are.
Hire 4 and beyond — a leader who is not also the best practitioner. Most teams promote their strongest doer and lose their strongest doer.
What PR people actually get paid
This is the question most people arrive at this page for, and the published answers are close to useless. For the single job title "PR account manager" in 2026:
| Source | Reported average |
|---|---|
| ZipRecruiter | $65,816 |
| Glassdoor | $102,425 |
| Salary.com | $162,351 |
A 2.5x spread for the same title. The aggregators are pooling different seniority levels, agency and in-house roles, and wildly different markets under one label. Treat any single figure you see with suspicion.
By market tier
Cost of living drives most of the variation. Roughly:
| Tier | Markets | Typical account manager range |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington DC | $95,000–$140,000 |
| Tier 2 | Austin, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, Atlanta, Miami | $75,000–$105,000 |
| Tier 3 | Smaller metros, most of the Midwest and South | $60,000–$85,000 |
| Fully remote | Anywhere | Usually a single national band |
Reported New York averages run around $170,000 for senior account management, and California overall around $179,000 — but those figures skew high because the sources sampling them oversample large agencies and senior titles.
What we actually pay
We are a fully remote firm, so rather than cite a range we do not use, here is ours directly:
| Level | What we pay |
|---|---|
| Associate / entry level | $60,000–$65,000 |
| Account manager | $75,000–$80,000 |
| Senior and above | Six figures, with no cap |
We publish this because the aggregate data is unreliable and because candidates deserve to know before they spend an hour on a first call.
Why remote changes the maths
We do not require anyone in an office, which means we pay one national band rather than a local one. For somebody in a tier 2 or tier 3 market, an $80,000 account manager salary buys a materially better life than $110,000 in San Francisco after rent. For somebody already in a tier 1 city, a remote firm paying a national band is usually a pay cut on paper.
That trade is the real story behind PR salary data and almost no published guide mentions it. If you are comparing offers, compare what is left after housing, not the headline.
The other roles
| Role | Typical US range | What they own |
|---|---|---|
| PR operations / coordinator | $55,000–$85,000 | Lists, scheduling, tracking, reporting |
| Communications director | $130,000–$200,000 | Strategy, messaging, exec counsel |
| Analyst relations | $120,000–$180,000 | Gartner, Forrester, IDC |
| VP Communications | $200,000–$300,000+ | Whole function, crisis, board reporting |
Agency and in-house pay differently at the same title. In-house generally pays more in cash at mid-level; agency generally offers faster progression and broader exposure early.
In-house versus agency
In-house wins on: knowing the product deeply, availability at short notice, permanent institutional memory, and long-run cost at scale.
Agency wins on: existing relationships on your beat from day one, breadth across several categories, ability to start and stop, and not carrying fixed cost through a quiet quarter.
The honest split most companies land on: one strong in-house person who owns relationships and internal coordination, plus an agency for reach, surge capacity and categories the in-house person does not cover.
An agency retainer and one fully loaded in-house hire cost about the same. The difference is that the agency arrives with a list and the employee builds one.
The thing that actually determines whether the team works
Not headcount. Approval speed.
A reporter asks for a quote at 10am for a 2pm deadline. If your process routes that through three people with no deadline, you are structurally excluded from the stories that matter most — and no amount of hiring fixes it.
"The programmes that work are the ones with a standing slot to approve things. When approval is ad hoc, everything ships late and the news peg is gone."
Kristin Kaplan, Operations, Salient PR
"The slowest part of most programmes isn't the agency. It's how long it takes to get a quote approved internally. Companies that can turn a quote in a day get into stories that companies who take a week never see."
Lindsey Ranger, Account Lead, Salient PR
Fix this before you hire anybody. It is free and it has a larger effect than a headcount.
How to tell whether your PR team is working
Coverage volume is the wrong measure — it rewards press releases and syndication, which are the two things that produce the most mentions and the least value.
Better questions:
What is the reply rate on outreach, in your category? Ask for it, and for the share of replies that are a yes; ours was 63% of graded replies a yes between December 2025 and August 2026. If nobody can tell you this number, nothing is being measured.
Do reporters come back to your spokespeople unprompted? The strongest signal that a programme is genuinely working.
Can you get a quote approved inside four hours?
Is anyone recording the pitches that failed? Most teams record only wins, which means the programme cannot improve.
"We log every reply and classify it. Positive, neutral, decline, confused. 'Confused' is the most useful one, because it means the pitch failed before the reporter even got to whether they cared."
Kristin Kaplan, Operations, Salient PR
When you genuinely do not need a PR team
If your buyers are found entirely through paid channels, if you are pre-product, or if your founder is already doing the work effectively and enjoying it — hire later. PR headcount added before there is anything to say produces activity, not coverage.
The short version
- Most companies need one good generalist, not a team.
- Hire someone who can write a pitch and hold a relationship. Not a strategist.
- Approval speed matters more than headcount and costs nothing to fix.
- Agency arrives with a list; an employee builds one. Similar cost, different shape.
- Published PR salary data spans 2.5x for the same title. We publish ours: $60–65k associate, $75–80k account manager, six figures above that.
- Measure reply rate and repeat reporter contact, not mention volume.
- Record the failures. Teams that only log wins never improve.
Salient PR runs earned media programmes for technology companies, often alongside a single in-house communications lead. Figures come from our own outreach database covering December 2025 to August 2026.
Sources
- Salient PR outreach database, Dec 2025 – Aug 2026
If you are deciding between hiring and outsourcing — Salient PR is a technology PR agency working with technology companies. See how we work or start a conversation.
Related reading
About Salient PR
Salient is a B2B tech PR agency. We help startups become the story — landing tier-one coverage, building executive visibility, and turning attention into pipeline.
Senior team. No hand-offs. Radical transparency. If you’re ready to talk, reach out.
What a PR team does, who to hire in what order, and what PR people actually get paid by market tier — including the salaries we pay at our own firm.
