If you look at the latest profiles from the RTDNA/Newhouse School Survey, the average radio program director age is now 51.1 years old. Meanwhile, Techsurvey 2026 tells us our core listener has grayed even further, with the average age climbing toward 58.4.
In short, we have a leadership core in their early 50s programming for an audience in their late 50s.
While that alignment may still work for revenue, it masks a terrifying reality: A mere 15% of PDs are under the age of 40. We are an industry where 85% of the decision-makers are effectively a decade or more older than the ‘young’ demographic we claim to be chasing. If we don’t start recruiting and paying for talent under 40, we aren’t just aging out — we’re aging into irrelevance.
In radio, we’ve spent a decade cutting various key positions. We’ve eliminated the assistant PDs, the music directors, and the night jocks who used to be our rising stars. Now, our veteran PDs have become ‘indispensable’ by default. But being indispensable isn’t a badge of honor—it’s a single point of failure for your legacy and, in addition, it’s burning them out.
Some actionable, DO-ABLE, thoughts follow:
- Draft Your Shadow: Identify one person on your staff who is under 35. It doesn’t matter if they are in sales, digital, or on-air. Give them ‘Read-Only’ access to your music program or invite them into the weekly programming meeting. If they don’t see how the engine works, they can’t learn how to drive it.
- An “Exchange” program: We are experts at the 30-second spot, but the next generation is experts at the 15-second TikTok hook. Propose a trade: mentor them on the fundamentals of brand architecture and ‘local-first’ programming, and let them mentor you on how to bridge the gap to the under-40 listener. We need their digital fluency as much as they need our institutional wisdom. The perfect trade-off. Be vulnerable enough to show them what you need.
- “Succession” Strategy: Make your legacy about the people you leave behind. Challenge yourself. If you walked away tomorrow, is there a single person in your building who could step into your shoes without the station skipping a beat? If the answer is no, your final career mission is to build that person. Pay it forward, so to speak
- PAY THEM! We talk about ‘passion for the industry,’ but passion doesn’t pay a 2026 mortgage. While we are trying to recruit the next generation of PDs, they are looking at the math. If a medium or large market Program Director’s salary hasn’t significantly moved since 2016, but the cost of living has skyrocketed, we aren’t ‘saving money’ — we are exporting talent to our competitors in digital media or onto businesses outside of the industry.
In many markets, the average PD salary has seen less than a 10% increase over the last decade, while entry-level management in competing fields has risen by 25-30%. We aren’t just competing with the station across the street for ears; we are competing with every digital agency in the market for brains. If the ‘Call to Action’ is to build a farm system, the ‘Business Case’ is that we have to fund it.
The data shows our leaders are 51 and our listeners are 58. The math shows our salaries are stuck in 2016. If we want a real future for radio, we have to stop treating programming as a ‘cost center’ to be trimmed and start treating it as the research and development department it truly is.
