Average Salary by Industry in 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.

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