What job makes 300k a year?

Which sector offers the most lucrative employment opportunities?

Simple question. Tough question to answer.

Good statistics have just lately been accessible; in fact, it wasn't until 2005 that tax returns started being regularly categorized by employment type.

GlassDoor's job seeker surveys form the foundation for many of the rankings of the top-paying positions; nevertheless, these rankings nearly wholly fail to take into account the highest earners.

Other rankings, such as the one that was published by US News, utilize median earnings rather than mean wages, which renders them uninformative for fields where incomes might vary widely from worker to worker.

The data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which is part of the federal government, is much improved; nonetheless, it does not adequately sample the persons with the greatest incomes.

However, we have access to a forthcoming paper written by three economists, Benjamin Lockwood (University of Pennsylvania), Charles Nathanson (Northwestern University), and Glen Weyl (Yale), which combines the figures from the BLS with new tax data in order to provide an accurate estimate of the entire income distribution of the 11 professions with the highest average salaries.

1 This is the highest rating that we are aware of at the moment.

In this piece, we take a look at these statistics and discuss how they may be interpreted in order to come up with an estimate of the predicted lifetime income of various occupations.

At 80,000 Hours, we assist individuals in finding occupations that are both satisfying and have a beneficial influence on the world. Earning more money doesn't make you much happy, but it does provide you more opportunities to do good things for other people and the world. If you are someone who is reading this, you are extremely likely to be in the top 1 percent of earners all around the world, even if you do not fall into the top 1 percent of earners in the United States. If you want to make a significant difference in the world, one of the most powerful things you can do is give away 10 percent of your salary to organizations that do a lot of good.

It is possible that you may be able to make an even greater influence by pursuing a higher-paying career; this course of action is what we refer to as "earning to give." Check out our main ideas page if you're interested in alternative methods to make a significant beneficial influence, such as via research, the government, or non-profit organizations.

The first place winner is medicine. The median annual salary of a doctor in the United States is over $200,000, which is much more than those in the fields of finance and law.

However, those who work in the legal and financial sectors bring home the most money overall. The top 1 percent of earners in the financial industry bring in more than $2 million annually. Given that there are 160 million people employed in the United States, this represents considerably over 10,000 persons working in finance.

And since there are eight times as many managers as physicians, the bulk of the highest-earning persons are managers. This is due to the fact that managers earn on average more than doctors.

The financial and real estate industries have the most uneven distribution of earnings. In the real estate industry, the top 1 percent make 27 times more than the middle earners.

The typical income of those working in the arts, sports, and entertainment is lower than that of teachers, yet the most successful make more than $500,000 a year.

A career as an engineer, a salesman, a pilot, or even a blue collar worker may lead to financial success, as we will demonstrate in the following paragraphs.

In the following paragraphs, we will go over some of the specifics of the study, as well as how to forecast lifetime income in various occupations.

Which occupations are represented in this table?

The eleven occupations shown in the table above (not including "Other") are responsible for 18% of all employment and 42% of all revenue. They provide coverage for over sixty percent of those earning over one hundred thousand dollars and more than ninety percent of persons earning over three hundred thousand dollars. 3

The following is a breakdown of how each profession was categorized (clicking on the links will take you to our most relevant profiles, where you can get further information):

Art (artists, entertainers, authors, and athletes) (artists, entertainers, writers, and athletes)

Engineering (computer programmers and engineers)

Finance (financial managers, financial analysts, financial advisers, and securities traders),

Law (lawyers and judges)

Management, which comprises executives as well as managers (unfortunately this includes managers across many sectors)

Medicine (doctors and dentists)

The workings of (consultants and IT professionals)

Real Estate (brokers, property managers and appraisers)

Investigate (professors and scientists)

Sales (sales representatives and advertising and insurance agents)

Instructional (primary and secondary school teachers)

One of the issues is that each category serves more than one function, which is a concern. For example, one of the reasons why there is such a large skew in the real estate industry is probably merely the fact that it comprises both affluent individuals who own hundreds of properties and appraisers, whose annual salaries average about $50,000.

Unfortuitously, there is also no category that adequately represents technological entrepreneurship, despite the fact that this seems to have been the primary factor in the creation of new wealth over the course of the last decade. Our best assessment is that the majority of them belong in the "management" category.

How do the folks who have the greatest incomes make their money?

The following table shows what percentage of each occupation is found at each income level.

This indicates that among people working in the occupations indicated above and earning around $10,000 per year, approximately fifty percent work in the arts (often known as "starving artists"), while the majority of the other individuals work in sales or teaching.

The majority of those who make $300,000 year are employed in the fields of management, law, finance, and medical.

The majority of people who make over $10 million per year are employed in management and finance, but there are also substantial numbers of people at this level working in sales, real estate, operations, medical, law, engineering, and the arts.

In point of fact, there is a gap in incomes both at the very lowest level of the art market and at the very top level, which is occupied by superstars.

It is important to emphasize that this is still just a preliminary investigation, as seen by the fact that the chart has some unusual kinks that suggest gaps and discrepancies in the data.