Best Paying Jobs in the US

Ranked by national median annual wage across all 783 occupations the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a wage for, the top ten are Congenital Heart Surgeon ($559,030), Cardiac Electrophysiologist ($496,010), Radiation Oncologist ($420,860), Anesthesiologist ($391,490), Cardiothoracic Surgeon ($358,550), Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon ($352,220), Emergency Medicine Physician ($335,550), Dermatologist ($328,730), Pathologist ($312,400), Prosthodontist ($311,180) (BLS OEWS, May 2025).

The hundredth occupation on the list, Chief Security Officer, still pays $106,660, roughly 2.1 times the $50,980 median across all US occupations. That gap is the real finding: the difference between the top of this list and the middle of the labor market is far larger than the difference between the top and the bottom of the list itself.

19 of the top twenty rows, and 30 of the top 100, are healthcare practitioner occupations. That is not a quirk of the data. Four things stack up in medicine and nowhere else at the same time: entry is rationed by residency places rather than by demand, the training runs eight to fifteen years after high school with the debt to match, the work carries personal liability, and the money that pays for it flows through insurance rather than through a customer deciding what a service is worth.

Two practical consequences are worth reading off the table. First, the specialties at the very top are small: several of them have only a few hundred openings a year nationally, so the headline number describes a narrow door. Second, published medians in this range are unstable, because the Bureau of Labor Statistics stops publishing an exact figure once a wage reaches its ceiling. Any figure shown with a plus sign in the table is that ceiling, not a measurement.

Filter the field control above to anything other than healthcare and the list changes character completely. The best paid non clinical occupations here are Airline Pilot ($232,140), Chief Executive ($213,990), Industrial-Organizational Psychologist ($193,950), Chief AI Officer ($175,140), Physicist ($172,250).

By field, the top 100 breaks down as healthcare practitioners and technical (30), management (21), architecture and engineering (13), life, physical, and social science (10), computer and mathematical (9). Management is the quiet winner: it has no single spectacular row, but it supplies more of the top 100 than any field except healthcare, and its occupations are entered with a bachelor degree and experience rather than with a decade of training. Engineering, computing and the physical sciences follow the same shape.

Pay is only one axis. If you want well paid work that is not built on constant pressure, the low stress jobs that pay well collection filters the same bank on O*NET work context, and the fastest growing careers ranks by projected demand instead of by pay.

8 of these 100 occupations are typically entered below a bachelor degree, led by Air Traffic Controller ($148,080), Commercial Pilot ($123,220), Nuclear Power Reactor Operator ($122,890), Nuclear Monitoring Technician ($110,240). Tap the entry requirement chips above the table to isolate them. They cluster in the same places every time: air and sea transport, power generation, and the licensed trades that keep expensive infrastructure running.

That is a short list here because this page ranks the whole labor market, and the top of the whole labor market is credentialed. For the full picture, the highest paying jobs without a degree explorer ranks 75 sub degree occupations on their own, with the same pay, growth and openings columns.

Of the top 100 occupations above, 34 require a doctoral or professional degree, 11 a master degree and 47 a bachelor degree. That is the top of the market, though, not the market. Every occupation in the bank carries the entry requirement BLS considers typical for it, and grouping all 783 of them by that level gives the clearest answer to the question, because it compares occupations rather than individual people.

Two things fall out of that table. The first is that the ladder is real but uneven. The middle occupation at doctorate level pays $103,410 against $50,070 at high school level, roughly double, while the small some college group sits below the certificate group rather than above it.

The second is how much the levels overlap. The best paying high school level occupation, Nuclear Power Reactor Operator at $122,890, out earns the typical occupation at every level on the table, doctorate included. Education sets the average outcome for an occupation. It does not set yours.

All 783 occupations in the bank with a published national median wage were ranked by that wage, and the top 100 are shown. Where several O*NET job titles share one BLS occupation code, and therefore one wage row, the table keeps a single entry for that code so the ranking does not repeat the same figure. Occupations with no published wage are excluded rather than estimated.

Want the version of this question that starts with you rather than with the money? The career directory holds full profiles for the same occupations, and the career quiz matches your strengths against them.