How To Become A Payment Collector: What It Is and Career Path

What is a payment collector and how to become one

Updated January 8, 2025

2 min read

There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being a payment collector. For example, did you know that they make an average of $17.48 an hour? That's $36,353 a year! Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow -8% and produce -17,500 job opportunities across the U.S.

ScorePayment CollectorUS Average

Salary

2.8

Avg. Salary $36,353

Avg. Salary $59,228

Stability level

7.9

Growth rate -8%

Growth rate 0.3%

Diversity

6.1

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 0.49%

Asian 3.74%

Black or African American 14.03%

Hispanic or Latino 19.79%

Unknown 3.78%

White 58.18%

Gender

female 76.92%

male 23.08%

Age - 46

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 3.00%

Asian 7.00%

Black or African American 14.00%

Hispanic or Latino 19.00%

White 57.00%

Gender

female 47.00%

male 53.00%

Age - 46

Stress level

7.9

Stress level is high

7.1 - high

Complexity level

4.9

Complexity level is intermediate

7 - challenging

Work life balance

7.6

Work life balance is good

6.4 - fair

Key steps to become a payment collector

Explore payment collector education requirements

Most common payment collector degrees

High School Diploma

31.8 %

Associate

26.1 %

Bachelor's

22.7 %

Start to develop specific payment collector skills

Skills	Percentages
Customer Service	27.54%
Payment Arrangements	9.68%
Outbound Calls	8.13%
Credit Card	8.09%
EOB	7.16%

Complete relevant payment collector training and internships

Accountants spend an average of 1-3 months on post-employment, on-the-job training. New payment collectors learn the skills and techniques required for their job and employer during this time. The chart below shows how long it takes to gain competency as a payment collector based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data and data from real payment collector resumes.

Research payment collector duties and responsibilities

Prevent impeding loss and increasing profitability through negotiation and enforcement of schedule collection campaigns, consistently achieving high success standards.
Post payments, EOB's, billing, call insurance's, patient statements and follow up
Prevent impeding loss and increasing profitability through negotiation and enforcement of schedule collection campaigns, consistently achieving high success standards.
Utilize various skip-tracing services such as Accurint and TheWorkNumber in order to locate consumers and verify employment for account recovery purposes.

Prepare your payment collector resume

When your background is strong enough, you can start writing your payment collector resume.

You can use Zippia's AI resume builder to make the resume writing process easier while also making sure that you include key information that hiring managers expect to see on a payment collector resume. You'll find resume tips and examples of skills, responsibilities, and summaries, all provided by Zippi, your career sidekick.

Choose from 10+ customizable payment collector resume templates

Build a professional payment collector resume in minutes. Browse through our resume examples to identify the best way to word your resume. Then choose from 10+ resume templates to create your payment collector resume.