The median salary for full-time workers in the United States was $49,500, based on estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2024. However, salaries vary by occupation. The charts below shows the spread.
How Much People Make Annually, by Occupation
Each circle represents an occupation, vertically positioned by the median salary and sized by number of workers. Color represents job category.
Healthcare practitioners, such as surgeons and emergency medicine physicians, sit at the top. Airline pilot is the only occupation with a median salary above $220,000 that is not in the healthcare category. Then there are the CEOs and managers, followed by computer and math jobs. After that, most jobs sit below the $100,000-mark by median.
See the chart below for how workers are distributed across job categories and salary.
Salaries by Job Category
Circles are sized by number of workers in each job. Hover over each circle for more estimates.
The internet tends to skew our perception of how much people make. We see the things that people buy, but that is not always a good indicator for the wages people earn. These distributions are more bottom heavy than you might expect if you based your estimates on social media.
That said, all these jobs have a range of salaries, too. It’s not just variation within job categories, but variation for each job. The above charts, along with median salary, show 25th and 75th percentiles.
For example, construction supervisors make a median salary of $78,690, but 25% made $62,400 or less (25th percentile) and 75% made $100,200 or less (75th percentile).
There are also geographic differences, made more interesting by cost of living, but we’ll save that for another time.
Notes
- Above is an updated version of charts from 2019. I adjusted the forces to better represent the distribution of salaries, so you can see more clustering at the bottom, the $100k mark, and above.
- The most recent data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- I prepared the data in R and made the beeswarm charts with D3.js.
