Pay ranking

The 50 highest-paying occupations

Ranked by BLS median annual wage, each shown with its AI-exposure score so you can see which top-paying roles are also resilient to automation. According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Projections 2024–2034 (wages as of May 2024), across 832 tracked occupations. See our methodology for how AI-exposure scores are computed.

The short version

Family medicine physicians tops this ranking. The full list below pairs each occupation with its AI-exposure score, so you can read the pay, growth and size of US work alongside how automatable it is, all from the same federal dataset.

The full ranking

# Occupation
1 Family medicine physicians
2 General internal medicine physicians
3 Airline pilots, copilots, and flight engineers
4 Dentists, all other specialists
5 Nurse anesthetists
6 Pediatricians, general
7 Chief executives
8 Dentists, general
9 Computer and information systems managers
10 Architectural and engineering managers
11 Physicists
12 Financial managers
13 Natural sciences managers
14 Marketing managers
15 Judges, magistrate judges, and magistrates
16 Computer hardware engineers
17 Podiatrists
18 Lawyers
19 Air traffic controllers
20 Petroleum engineers
21 Computer and information research scientists
22 Compensation and benefits managers
23 Human resources managers
24 Purchasing managers
25 Political scientists
26 Public relations managers
27 Medical dosimetrists
28 Sales managers
29 Pharmacists
30 Managers, all other
31 Database architects
32 Aerospace engineers
33 Optometrists
34 Physician assistants
35 Software developers
36 Astronomers
37 Computer network architects
38 Nurse practitioners
39 Nurse midwives
40 Electronics engineers, except computer
41 Nuclear engineers
42 Training and development managers
43 Advertising and promotions managers
44 Law teachers, postsecondary
45 Actuaries
46 Veterinarians
47 Information security analysts
48 Fundraising managers
49 Commercial pilots
50 Nuclear power reactor operators

Source: BLS Employment Projections 2024–2034 (employment, growth, wages); O*NET task data for AI-exposure analysis by PlainWorkforce. Ranked across 832 occupations.

The bar to make this list

The bar to make this list

Where the #50 cutoff (median annual wage) sits among all 832 tracked occupations

$122,610 50th of 809 higher than 759 of 809 occupations

median annual wage, bucketed by value

Each bar is a $10K-wide band; taller bars hold more occupations. The dashed line + filled bar mark this entry. Hover or tap any bar for its full count and share, and where it sits relative to this entry.

Source BLS Employment Projections 2024–2034 / O*NET 30.0 · 2026-05-15

How this ranking is built

Employment, projected growth and median-wage figures come directly from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Projections 2024–2034 and Occupational Employment Statistics. AI-exposure scores are PlainWorkforce's analysis of O*NET 30.0 task data, estimating the share of each occupation's tasks susceptible to current automation. Pairing the two lets you see not just where the jobs, pay or decline are, but how exposed each role is to AI. You can verify the underlying projections with BLS →.

Caveats and limitations

BLS projections are model-based and carry their own uncertainty intervals; they predate the most recent macroeconomic shifts. Percentage changes can look dramatic for small occupations, always check absolute employment on each occupation page. AI-exposure scores estimate current task automatability and may shift as capabilities advance.

Related rankings

Safest from AI → Fastest-growing → All rankings Key statistics

Every figure on PlainWorkforce is rendered directly from BLS/O*NET source data, no number is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these figures, or report a data error. Data current as of BLS Employment Projections 2024-2034.