Arts and culture were 4.2% of U.S. GDP in 2023, in an account BEA will no longer regularly produce

On April 2, 2025, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) published its Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account for 2023. It valued arts and cultural economic activity in the United States at $1.17 trillion, or 4.2% of gross domestic product. Adjusted for inflation, that activity grew 6.6% in 2023, after 3.8% in 2022, while real GDP grew 2.9%. No newer edition has followed: in February 2026, BEA posted on the account's page that it “will no longer regularly produce these statistics.”

What the account measures

BEA built the account by separating detailed data out of its existing statistics, to show activity that is hard to see in the core national accounts. It defines arts and cultural production narrowly: creative artistic activity, the goods and services it produces, those produced to support it, and the construction of the buildings where it takes place. The headline measure is value added, an industry's output minus what it buys in from others, such as the costumes a theater company rents. Employment counts wage and salary jobs.

The account has two halves. Core industries, such as performing arts, museums and design services, originate the ideas and content. Supporting industries, among them publishing, motion pictures, sound recording and broadcasting, produce and distribute it. In 2023 the supporting side was much larger, at $873.8 billion in value added against $265.8 billion for the core, though the core grew faster in current dollars, by 10.6% against 6.8%.

Where the money was

The largest single piece was not a stage or a studio. BEA's category of other information services, which its industry list maps to internet publishing and broadcasting and web search portals, news syndicates, and libraries and archives, added 0.65 percentage points to the 4.2% share in 2023, more than any other industry in its table (our reading). Broadcasting added 0.54 points, publishing 0.45 and motion pictures 0.33. Sound recording added 0.08 points. BEA notes that not all activity in a listed industry counts as arts and culture.

Growth came mostly from the same corner. In BEA's table of contributions, information industries supplied 4.4 of the 6.6 points of real growth in 2023, about two-thirds, and other information services alone 2.8 points, about two-fifths (our calculations). In current dollars, the gross output of other information services reached $344.1 billion in 2023, 87% more than in 2018 (our calculation). Gross output is an industry's output before the inputs it buys are subtracted, so it runs higher than value added.

Music, live events and TV

Live events kept climbing after their collapse in 2020, when the real value added of promoters of performing arts and similar events, a category that in BEA's list also takes in sports promoters, fell 44.4%. Promoters grew 20.7% in 2023, after 68.4% in 2022, and performing arts companies 31.6%, after 42.0%. Promoters' gross output was $60.1 billion in 2023, against $38.8 billion in 2019, in current dollars that are not adjusted for inflation (our comparison).

Recorded music cooled. Sound recording saw its real value added fall 1.2% in 2023 after a 21.7% rise in 2022, although its gross output still edged up to $30.6 billion from $29.4 billion in current dollars. Broadcasting's real value added rose 3.4% after a 2.8% fall, while its gross output slipped 3.1% to $290.8 billion (our calculation). Motion pictures grew 2.7% in real terms, and independent artists, writers and performers fell 11.9%.

Jobs, pay and states

The account counted 5.4 million arts and cultural jobs in 2023, 0.3% more than in 2022, and compensation rose 3.6%, to about $553.9 billion. California had the most of those jobs, 821,183, after a 2.6% fall (our reading of BEA's state table).

Washington state had the largest arts and cultural share of GDP, 9.8%, and Delaware the smallest, 1.2%; only Washington, the District of Columbia, New York, California and Nevada were above 5%. BEA names broadcasting and other information services as the leading contributors in New York, and other information services and motion pictures in California. Those two states together produced 39% of the national arts and cultural value added (our calculation).

Why there is no newer edition

A successor was planned. BEA's page for the 2023 release listed the next edition, with figures for 2024, for March 2026. In February 2026, BEA posted its notice that it will no longer regularly produce the statistics; the notice gives no reason. On November 11, 2026, the account's page still showed the April 2, 2025 release as current. The 2025 release says the account was supported by funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Every figure here therefore describes 2023, not today, and BEA has published no newer total. For more recent official figures on parts of the field, see our reports on U.S. payroll jobs in film and sound recording and on jobs in the UK's creative sectors.