Employment-size ranking

The 50 largest occupations by employment

The occupations that employ the most US workers today, each with its AI-exposure score, where automation pressure meets the biggest headcounts. 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

Home health and personal care aides 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 Home health and personal care aides
2 Retail salespersons
3 Fast food and counter workers
4 General and operations managers
5 Registered nurses
6 Cashiers
7 Laborers and freight, stock, and material movers, hand
8 Customer service representatives
9 Stockers and order fillers
10 Office clerks, general
11 Janitors and cleaners, except maids and housekeeping cleaners
12 Waiters and waitresses
13 Heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers
14 Secretaries and administrative assistants, except legal, medical, and executive
15 Software developers
16 Maintenance and repair workers, general
17 Bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks
18 Accountants and auditors
19 First-line supervisors of office and administrative support workers
20 Miscellaneous assemblers and fabricators
21 Cooks, restaurant
22 Construction laborers
23 Nursing assistants
24 First-line supervisors of retail sales workers
25 Teaching assistants, except postsecondary
26 Elementary school teachers, except special education
27 Maids and housekeeping cleaners
28 Managers, all other
29 Sales representatives, wholesale and manufacturing, except technical and scientific products
30 Security guards
31 Sales representatives of services, except advertising, insurance, financial services, and travel
32 First-line supervisors of food preparation and serving workers
33 Business operations specialists, all other
34 Landscaping and groundskeeping workers
35 Secondary school teachers, except special and career/technical education
36 Light truck drivers
37 Management analysts
38 Project management specialists
39 Receptionists and information clerks
40 Childcare workers
41 Carpenters
42 Human resources specialists
43 Market research analysts and marketing specialists
44 First-line supervisors of construction trades and extraction workers
45 Food preparation workers
46 Financial managers
47 Lawyers
48 Shipping, receiving, and inventory clerks
49 Medical secretaries and administrative assistants
50 Farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers

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

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.

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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.