---
title: "What can you do with a history degree?"
description: "15 careers history graduates commonly move into, with BLS median pay, projected growth and entry requirements for each."
canonical: "https://nuecareer.com/careers/majors/history"
last-updated: "2026-08-23T07:20:09.337Z"
---

# What can you do with a history degree?

**What the degree involves:** Primary sources, historiography, and long essays argued from evidence you found.

History is a research and writing degree that happens to be about the past. Teaching and law are the two best-worn routes out of it; the rest of the destinations are the analysis, records and communication roles where being able to find evidence and write it up clearly is the actual job.

15 common destinations, ordered most common first rather than highest paid first. 6 of 15 have a master's or a doctoral or professional degree as their BLS typical entry education, and 12 of 15 are projected to grow. A major is a body of study, not a job assignment: these are destinations of people who took the degree, not what the degree entitles anyone to.

| # | Occupation | Median annual wage | Projected change | Openings a year | Typical entry education |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | [High School Teacher](https://nuecareer.com/careers/high-school-teacher) | $72,040 | -1.6% | 66,200 | Bachelor's |
| 2 | [Paralegal](https://nuecareer.com/careers/paralegal) | $62,890 | +0.2% | 39,300 | Associate's |
| 3 | Writer and Author | $76,910 | +3.6% | 13,400 | Bachelor's |
| 4 | Editor | $77,920 | +0.6% | 9,800 | Bachelor's |
| 5 | Technical Writer | $90,390 | +0.9% | 4,500 | Bachelor's |
| 6 | [Market Research Analyst and Marketing Specialist](https://nuecareer.com/careers/market-research-analyst-and-marketing-specialist) | $78,760 | +6.7% | 87,200 | Bachelor's |
| 7 | [Management Analyst](https://nuecareer.com/careers/management-analyst) | $101,860 | +8.8% | 98,100 | Bachelor's |
| 8 | [Librarian](https://nuecareer.com/careers/librarian) | $68,270 | +1.7% | 13,500 | Master's (graduate study) |
| 9 | Archivist | $64,550 | +3.8% | 1,100 | Master's (graduate study) |
| 10 | Museum Technician and Conservator | $51,440 | +5.4% | 1,900 | Bachelor's |
| 11 | Curator | $63,420 | +7.0% | 1,800 | Master's (graduate study) |
| 12 | [Intelligence Analyst](https://nuecareer.com/careers/intelligence-analyst) | $93,790 | -0.7% | 7,800 | High school |
| 13 | [Lawyer](https://nuecareer.com/careers/lawyer) | $159,670 | +4.1% | 31,500 | Doctorate (graduate study) |
| 14 | Historian | $76,750 | +2.2% | 300 | Master's (graduate study) |
| 15 | History Teacher, Postsecondary | $83,820 | -0.2% | 1,700 | Doctorate (graduate study) |

Wages are BLS OEWS, May 2025. Projected change, annual openings and typical entry education are BLS Employment Projections. Occupation descriptions are O\*NET. Nothing on this page is estimated and no figure is generated by an AI model.

Full record for any row, including wage percentiles and state-level pay: https://nuecareer.com/careers/{slug} or https://nuecareer.com/api/v1/careers/{slug}. Other majors: https://nuecareer.com/careers/majors

---

This bank includes information from the O\*NET 30.3 Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). Used under the CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). O\*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. NueCareer has transformed the data by joining it to BLS wage and projection data and deriving facet, personality-fit and AI-resilience scores. BLS and BEA data are public domain (17 U.S.C. §105).

O\*NET content is used under [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). How these figures are sourced and derived: https://nuecareer.com/careers/methodology