Salary and Occupation

Salaries vary across occupations. The charts below show by how much for 800 of them.

At one end of the spectrum, based on 2018 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, physicians have a median salary of $200,890 in the United States. In contrast, waiters and waitresses have a median salary of $21,780.

While the above gives you an overall picture, it’s difficult to see separate distributions between occupation groups. There’s a lot of green (healthcare practitioners) and blue (management) at the top and brown (food preparation and serving) and red (sales) at the bottom.

But there’s a lot of overlap in the middle. So here’s the same view with occupation groups separated.

I can’t say there are any surprises.

Management has a high median but also has a wide range, because the position of manager is generic and is relevant to different industries and levels. It’s similar for health practitioners, which includes both pharmacy technicians and surgeons.

Then there are industries such as administrative support and construction, which tend towards lower salaries and a smaller range (but the full ranges show room for growth).

Mostly though, it’s interesting to see the full distributions all at once. You also get a good idea of where you land.

Notes

• The data comes from the most recent estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There are four levels of occupation categories: major, minor, broad, and detailed. I went with the highest granularity, which is detailed. This is 804 occupations, but I limited it to jobs with at least 500 people. This brought the count down to 800.
• I prepared the data in R.
• I made the charts with D3.js.