Salary by occupation

What's covered

We break the Census occupation codes into 171 groups that each have at least 10,000 survey records of workers aged 25 to 64, then publish a full page for the 50 largest. Large samples matter: they let us show pay by age band, by sex and by education level without guessing, and every cell with fewer than 100 records is left blank instead of estimated.

Across these 50 occupations the median runs from $20,285 for cashiers to $233,508 for physicians. The middle of the list is retail sales supervisors at $50,763. 25 of the 50 pay more than the $52,508 median for all US earners aged 25 and older.

All figures are personal earnings — wages, salary and self-employment income — in 2024 dollars, and they include part-time and part-year workers. That makes them lower than the full-time salary figures you'll see in job postings, but it means they describe what people in each occupation actually took home over a year. If you want to see where your own pay falls inside an occupation, each page links straight to the calculator with that job pre-selected.

Browse by field

The 16 fields below follow the Census's major occupation groups. Within a field, pay can differ more than it does between fields — compare, say, physicians and registered nurses — so the detailed page is usually the better reference.