The Highest Paying Jobs in the US
Ranked by median annual salary across all 399 occupations this site covers, the highest-paying work in the United States is overwhelmingly medical. The ranking below uses the median rather than the mean, because a handful of very high earners drags a mean upward and makes a job look better paid than it typically is.
How the ranking is built
Every figure comes from one federal release, so the jobs are genuinely comparable with each other. The table is generated from the same data as the individual occupation pages, which means the ranking here and the number on any given page can never disagree.
One caveat worth having before you read it. Median pay says nothing about how long the training takes, what it costs, or how many jobs exist. Several of the occupations at the top of this list require a decade of training and admit a few thousand people a year.
What a pay ranking leaves out
A list ordered by salary answers one question and quietly implies answers to several others it has no information about. Employment size is the most important of these: an occupation can pay extremely well and employ only a few thousand people nationally, which makes it a poor target for someone choosing a direction.
Read any high salary alongside these, all of which appear on the individual occupation pages.
- Total US employment, which tells you whether the job actually exists in numbers
- The 10th percentile, which is closer to what you earn starting out than the median is
- The gap between median and mean, which shows how lopsided the pay distribution is
- State figures, because the national median can be far from what your state pays
Common questions
What is the highest paying job in the US?
- By median annual salary in the May 2025 federal wage data, the highest-paid occupations are medical specialties, led by surgical and anaesthesia subspecialties. Physicians occupy most of the top twenty, and the first occupation outside medicine appears lower than most people expect.
Do these salaries include bonuses?
- They include base pay, cost-of-living allowances, incentive pay such as commissions and production bonuses, and on-call pay. They exclude employer contributions to benefits, back pay, tuition reimbursement and severance. Non-production bonuses are excluded, which matters most in fields where annual bonuses are a large share of total compensation.
Why is the median used instead of the average?
- Because pay distributions are skewed. In most occupations the mean sits above the median, because a small group of very high earners pulls it up while nobody can earn less than nothing at the other end. The median is the salary of the person in the middle, which is the closer answer to what the job typically pays.