The 100 most common occupations in the United States, May 2025

Reading this list

• The most common occupation is Home Health and Personal Care Aides, with 4,305,810 jobs and a median pay of $35,800 a year.
• The median for all occupations was $50,980 a year. 50 of these 100 occupations have a median below it.
• Jobs are counted, not people: someone with two jobs is counted twice. The self-employed are left out.

What the list is made of

The 100 occupations come from 18 fields, led by Food Preparation and Serving Related (11), Office and Administrative Support (11), Transportation and Material Moving (9), Business and Financial Operations (9) and Sales and Related (8). The ten largest alone hold 32,874,650 jobs, 21% of all jobs counted, and an occupation needs 380,500 jobs to make the list (Correctional Officers and Jailers, at number 100).

Pay on the list runs from $30,890 a year for Cooks, Fast Food to $175,140 for Computer and Information Systems Managers. Because these occupations employ so many people, their medians do more to set the national median of $50,980 than the well-known high-paying professions do.

How to use the list

If you want to know what most people around you are paid, this is the list to read. Open an occupation to see how its pay stretches from the lowest-paid tenth to the highest-paid tenth and how it differs by state. The filter box accepts the name of a field as well as a job title, so typing "health" or "office" shows that field's largest occupations.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025. Checked in November 2026. Figures are for employees, before tax, and leave out overtime pay and benefits. They are official statistics, not advice or a pay offer; see bls.gov/oes for the original tables.