Who earns a higher salary than you and the jobs they work

Is your salary high, low, or somewhere in the middle? What do people with higher salaries than you do for a living? Doctors, lawyers, and tech workers come to mind, but there is a wider range of occupations, depending on the income level you’re comparing against.

See Who Makes More Than You

Use the slider to adjust annual salary. Each rectangle represents an occupation, and the size represents the number of workers who made more, given a salary.

This is based on data from the five-year American Community Survey for 2023.

Percentages are out of workers who reported salary income greater than zero. So you see all the jobs when the threshold is set to $0. Increase the threshold, and, as expected, the percentage of people who make more decreases. Administrative support and sales grow less common as management and healthcare practitioners become more common with higher income.

At $45,000 per year, half of workers make more. The share of workers who make more decreases quicker with higher thresholds. At $100,000, only 16% of workers make more. 4% of workers make more than $200,000.

The final 1% makes more than $520,000. While the categories — management, healthcare practitioners, and sales — seem about right, I am curious about the less typical jobs, such as cashiers and elementary school teachers who reported making more than half a million in salary. I suspect these are directors and managers who do more than manage. Or it could just be noise. I’m betting the former.

Notes

The data comes from the five-year American Community Survey for 2023, which I downloaded via IPUMS. I analyzed and processed the data in R. I made the interactive chart with D3.js.