COOKED
The teller's core loop — accepting deposits, cashing checks, verifying identity, balancing a cash drawer, answering balance and fee questions — has been under attack by ATMs, deposit-capture apps, and chat agents for two decades, and generative AI finishes the job on the conversational and paperwork side. What remains is physical cash and coin handling in a branch plus the in-person reassurance older and small-business customers pay for, which is real but supports far fewer positions per branch. Modal work is procedural with no licensure and little discretion; branch consolidation, not sudden task replacement, is the mechanism of decline.
Part 2020 shock, part continued decline in the years since.
Median pay $31,230 → $43,030 +10.2% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
-12.9% 347,400 → 302,500 on the projections basis
Exposed, and shrinking
Both signals point the same way: the tasks are largely automatable and the BLS projects -12.9% by 2034. This is the case where the score and the forecast agree, and it is the one worth taking seriously.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~29,800 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
BankerTellerCashierBank TellerLoan TellerMail TellerNote TellerCoupon ClerkVault TellerBranch TellerMoney CounterPaying TellerRetail BankerRoving TellerExchange ClerkOn-call TellerSavings TellerUtility TellerDrive-in TellerExchange TellerPersonal BankerBilingual TellerFinancial TellerReceiving Teller
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Core tasks are already automatable Deposit acceptance, check cashing, balance inquiries, and drawer-balancing are already executed end-to-end by ATMs, remote deposit capture, and interactive teller machines — the 5 rather than 0 reflects only cash recycling exceptions, coin and currency straps, and safe-deposit box access that still route through a person.
Some physical or field component You physically count and strap currency, load and clear the cash recycler, escort customers to safe deposit boxes, and handle night-drop bags — but all of it happens inside a climate-controlled branch behind a counter, which is why this is a 7 and not the 13+ of field work.
No licence, no signature requirement No licence or certification gates the teller window; BSA/AML training and the CTR/SAR filing you initiate are institutional obligations that the bank and its compliance officer answer for, and the FDIC examines the bank, not you.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs Your discretion caps out at hold decisions within a posted schedule, override thresholds you must escalate above, and flagging a structuring pattern to compliance — the dollar limits, ID requirements, and referral scripts are written down before you arrive.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (5/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (1/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (7/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (3/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 11 of this occupation's 23 points (48%).
Embodiment (7/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 35/100 — EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift is genuinely available here: as deposits and balance queries move to apps, the residual in-branch loop becomes fraud interdiction — elder financial exploitation holds, scam-in-progress interruption, forged-endorsement catches. Several states (e.g. under NASAA's model act, adopted in 30+ states) already authorize or require frontline staff to place holds on suspected exploitation. If banks formally reclassify the role toward fraud-prevention specialist, the remaining day is judgment-tier.
Physical cash and coin volume is the durable floor: vault balancing, counterfeit detection by feel, coin/currency ordering for small businesses, safe-deposit box dual-control access. This does not rise on its own, but a US retreat from cashless trend (state cash-mandate laws) preserves the existing 7 rather than eroding it.
Same NASAA/state elder-exploitation statutes give the employee discretion to delay a disbursement — a consequential call under ambiguity with safe-harbor protection. If banks document and audit teller-initiated holds as an owned decision rather than an escalation, this rises.
Bank Secrecy Act / FinCEN enforcement trend requiring a named human employee to observe and attest in-person cash transactions — e.g. CTR filing and SAR-triggering behavioral observation for cash over $10,000, plus state cash-access laws (San Francisco, NJ, NYC) mandating branches accept cash. If a rule made human attestation of large-cash origin non-delegable to a kiosk, teller-level sign-off gains a thin statutory floor.
The limit. No realistic route to a meaningful trust premium: buyers do not choose a bank for its tellers, and branch consolidation is driven by real-estate economics, not task capability. Even with every lever, headcount per branch keeps falling — the levers protect the character of surviving roles, not their number.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 15,820 | $47,230 +10% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 9,930 | $44,540 +4% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 8,790 | $46,350 +8% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 6,010 | $39,270 -9% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 6,010 | $45,130 +5% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 5,760 | $45,090 +5% |
| Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI | 5,130 | $45,110 +5% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 4,820 | $47,520 +10% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 1,030 | $50,090 +16% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 3,730 | $49,880 +16% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 2,810 | $49,370 +15% |
El Periódico reports that Spain's Ibex 35 listed banks cut 8,193 jobs and closed 1,247 branches over the past year during a period of increased AI adoption.
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