Highest Paying Jobs in the US

Look down the top of the ranking and a few patterns stand out. Most of the best-paid jobs combine long training with high responsibility:

• Medicine dominates. Physicians and surgeons take the top places, because they need four years of medical school and three to seven years of residency, and errors are costly. Dentists, nurse anesthetists, pharmacists and physician assistants are not far behind.
• Management pays. Chief executives, IT managers, architectural and engineering managers and financial managers all earn well over $150,000; most need a degree and five years or more of experience.
• Technology and engineering fill much of the $120,000–$160,000 band, usually with a bachelor’s degree and no prior experience needed.
• Scarce licences raise pay without a degree: pilots, air traffic controllers, elevator installers and power plant operators are paid for skills that take years of supervised training.

More than 300 of the 515 jobs need no college degree to start, but only a handful of them pay over $100,000. The best routes are skilled trades and jobs with a licence, where you train on the job and often earn while you learn:

• Apprenticeships: elevator and escalator installers, electricians, plumbers and power-line workers learn over four to five years of paid apprenticeship.
• Certificates: commercial pilots, aircraft mechanics, HVAC technicians and licensed practical nurses train at a flight school, trade school or community college, often in under two years.
• Long on-the-job training: power plant operators, refinery operators and transportation inspectors learn inside the company.
• Promotion: first-line supervisors and managers in transportation, police and construction rise from the ranks with experience.

An associate’s degree opens another tier: air traffic controllers, dental hygienists, diagnostic medical sonographers and MRI technologists all have medians close to or above $95,000.

The median salary is what the middle worker in a job earns, before tax and leaving out the self-employed. Starting pay is usually well below it; the job’s own page shows the 10th percentile, a better guide to entry pay, and the top 10%, which shows how far the job can take you. The number of workers matters too: a job with hundreds of thousands of people has far more openings each year than one with 20,000.

State pages rank jobs by average salary, the one figure BLS publishes for every job in every state. Pay is usually higher in states with higher living costs, so compare take-home pay and rent before moving for a salary.

Salaries come from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, which collects pay for about 1.1 million workplaces and covers more than 830 occupations. This ranking keeps the 515 detailed jobs with at least 20,000 workers nationally, so rare jobs with unreliable estimates are left out. Education, experience and training levels come from the BLS Employment Projections program (2025 assignments). The next wage release, for May 2026, is due in spring 2027, and the ranking will be updated then.