Average Salary by Industry 2026

The Highest-Paying Industries in 2026

The top of the table is not a list of jobs — it is a list of sectors where capital, licensing, or scale lets a small headcount capture a lot of revenue. Information employs just 3.0 million people, under 2% of U.S. jobs, and pays 2.3× the all-industry average. It also posted the fastest one-year gain of any sector, up 9.3%.

• Information — $184,220. Software, streaming, telecom, and data processing. The highest sector average, and the fastest-growing.
• Management of companies & enterprises — $165,866. Corporate and regional headquarters. Almost entirely management and professional roles, with no frontline staff to average down.
• Finance & insurance — $152,846. Banking, insurance, and securities. The widest internal spread of any sector on this list.
• Professional, scientific & technical services — $134,893. Law, accounting, consulting, engineering, and IT services — the largest of the high-paying sectors, with over 10 million jobs.
• Mining, quarrying, oil & gas extraction — $133,472. Oil, gas, and mining. Pays well, but employs fewer than 600,000 people and swings with commodity prices.

11 of the 20 sectors pay above the all-industry average, but they hold only about 40% of the jobs. Most Americans work in a sector that pays below the mean — which is exactly why the mean is a poor personal benchmark.

What Is a Good Salary in Each Industry?

A sector average tells you what an industry pays. It does not tell you whether that is a good salary — that turns on tax, rent, and what the money buys where you live. The third column below opens the benchmark page nearest each of the ten highest-paying sectors, which prices exactly those things. The fourth opens a paycheck calculator already loaded with the sector figure.

The benchmark pages come in round steps, so each row points at the closest one rather than an exact match, and neighboring sectors can share a page. The hourly figure under each average is that average divided by 2,080paid hours — 40 a week for 52 weeks. Read it as pay conversion arithmetic rather than a wage anyone was observed earning: QCEW counts part-time jobs at full weight, so in a shift-heavy sector the rate a full-time worker actually earns per hour runs above what the division implies.

For take-home rather than gross, the biweekly paycheck calculator opens on the all-industry average of $78,722 and splits it across 26 paychecks after federal, state, and FICA withholding; the semi-monthly version does the same across 24. Swap the salary field for your own sector's figure from the table above.

Industry is one of four ways to cut the same question, and the other three often explain more of your number than your sector does. Average salary by job title prices the role rather than the employer. Average salary by state sets the same paycheck against where it is earned and what living there costs. And average salary by age shows how much of a gap is career stage rather than industry at all.

How to Read These Numbers

The figures above are average pay per job, calculated as every dollar of wages a sector paid divided by the number of jobs it filled. Three things follow from that definition, and they explain almost every “that can't be right” reaction:

• Part-time jobs count fully. Accommodation & food services averages $30,935 not because a full-time restaurant manager earns that, but because the sector runs on part-time shifts. A full-time role there pays far more than the sector average implies.
• It is a mean, not a median. A few very large paychecks lift the average above what a typical worker sees. The median full-time worker earns $1,235 a week — $64,220 a year — well under the $78,722 mean.
• Bonuses and stock count as wages. Anything taxable is in there, including exercised stock options. That is part of why information and finance sit so far above everything else.

Treat a sector average as a floor-to-ceiling reference, not a target. To see what any of these figures is worth per hour or per paycheck, run it through the salary converter — or start with the breakdown of $80,000 a year, the nearest round figure to the all-industry average.

Tech vs Finance

At sector level it is not close: information averages $184,220 against $152,846 for finance and insurance, a 21% gap. Zoom in one level, though, and finance takes it back. Securities and commodity contracts — trading desks, brokerages, asset managers — averages $334,624 per job, nearly double the $176,368 in computer systems design, the sub-industry that holds most software and IT-services jobs.

The difference is shape. Tech pays a high, fairly flat wage across millions of engineers. Finance pays ordinary money to retail bankers — depository credit intermediation averages about $116,000 — and extraordinary money to a small number of people at the top. Which sector “pays more” depends entirely on where in it you land.

Where Most People Actually Work

The three largest employing sectors — health care and social assistance (25.1 million jobs), retail trade (15.4 million), and accommodation and food services (14.2 million) — all pay below the all-industry average. Health care, the single biggest, averages $68,445. Retail and food service together account for roughly 19% of all U.S. jobs and sit at the very bottom of the table; restaurants alone average $27,804 per job, again reflecting part-time hours as much as hourly rates.

Sector averages also say nothing about where you live. A $68,445 health care salary buys a very different life in San Francisco than in San Antonio. Adjust for that with the cost of living adjustment tool.

Using Industry Data in a Negotiation

A sector average is weak evidence on its own — your employer knows it lumps interns in with executives. It becomes useful in two specific ways. First, as a growth argument: average pay rose 4.2% across all industries last year, and faster than that in 7of the twenty sectors. If your raise came in under your sector's number in the table above, that gap is a fact you can put on the table. Second, as a switching argument: the table above prices the cost of staying in a low-paying sector, and the same skills often transfer across sector lines at a large premium.

Turn the number into an ask with our guide to asking for a raise and the salary negotiation guide. If you are trying to work out whether your own number is any good, start with how much a good salary really is.

Frequently Asked Questions