Methodology and data sources

Pay figures

Wages come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, national and state files. The “median” is the wage at which half of the people employed in the occupation earn more and half earn less. Percentiles work the same way: the 90th percentile is the wage that 90 percent of workers earn less than. These describe people already working in the job, including those with decades of experience, so entry pay is lower.

BLS converts hourly wages to annual figures by assuming 2,080 hours of work a year. For some occupations (most teachers, pilots, athletes) BLS publishes annual figures only; those occupations show no hourly rate and are excluded from hourly rankings such as the $30-an-hour pages. Where BLS suppresses an estimate for a state, the state is omitted rather than estimated.

Typical entry education, growth, and openings

These come from BLS Employment Projections Table 1.2 (“Occupational projections, 2025–35, and worker characteristics”), which covers 831 detailed occupations. BLS assigns each one the education level most workers need to enter it, from eight categories: no formal educational credential; high school diploma or equivalent; postsecondary nondegree award; some college, no degree; associate’s degree; bachelor’s degree; master’s degree; doctoral or professional degree. We call an occupation “below a bachelor’s” when its assignment is one of the first five. That is 541 of the 831.

This label is BLS’s description of what is typical, not a legal requirement. Many of these occupations also require a license, an apprenticeship, or an academy, and the career pages say so. Growth is the projected percent change in employment from 2025 to 2035; openings are the projected average annual openings from growth plus workers leaving the occupation.

Share of workers without a bachelor’s degree

The O*NET 31.0 Database publishes, for most occupations, the distribution of education levels reported by people working in the job. We add the categories below a bachelor’s degree (less than high school through associate’s degree) into a single share. O*NET publishes this distribution for 647 of the occupations we cover; the rest show “not published” rather than an estimate. This summary is our modification of O*NET data; USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested it.

Rankings and data pages

The highest-paying list ranks the below-bachelor’s occupations by the May 2025 median annual wage in Table 1.2. The $30-an-hour pages list the below-bachelor’s occupations whose OEWS median hourly wage in the nation or the state is $30.00 or more. Data was built on 2026-09-07; we rebuild when BLS or O*NET publish a new release.

Career pages

The pay card, fact row, state table, and questions on each career page are generated from the files above. The description of the work is O*NET’s. The “how people get in” section and the next-step card are written by our research desk from state licensing rules, apprenticeship programs, certifying bodies, and provider price lists; costs and durations are ranges as of the “updated” date under the title, and you should confirm the current figures with the provider and your state before paying anything.

Job listings and requirement labels

We collect openings directly from employers’ own applicant tracking systems, never from other job boards, and every listing links to the employer’s own apply page. Each posting’s qualifications section is read for its education requirement, and the listing is labeled with one of five tiers. The exact sentence we relied on is quoted on the listing, with the date we last checked the posting.

High school or GED stated

The posting's qualifications name a high school diploma, GED, or equivalent as the education requirement and nothing higher.

No degree mentioned

The posting states no education requirement at all. It may still ask for experience, a license, or a certification.

Associate's or certificate stated

The posting requires an associate's degree, a postsecondary certificate, or a specific credential below a bachelor's.

Degree or equivalent experience

The posting names a bachelor's degree but explicitly accepts equivalent experience in its place.

Degree preferred

The posting says a degree is preferred, not required. Employers with this wording often screen on it, so we label it and let you decide.

Postings that require a bachelor’s degree or higher are not listed. Neither are postings that charge applicants a fee, pay commission only, involve multilevel marketing, or require paying for training as a condition of hire. We recheck every listing against the employer’s system at least daily and remove it when the employer does.

Labels are applied by software and checked by hand. Before listings go live we sample live postings, have them labelled by a person who has not seen the software or its answers, and compare. The bar we hold ourselves to is that at least 97 percent of the listings the software would publish are ones the human labeller agrees belong here.

Latest check

On September 7, 2026 we sampled 327 postings from 22 employers and had them labelled independently. Of the 128 postings the software would have published, the labeller agreed with all 128, and it correctly excluded all 30 postings that should never be listed. It assigned the exact tier correctly on 91 percent of published listings.

It is also wrong in the other direction: it rejected 72 postings the labeller considered publishable, usually because the posting names a degree next to a specific accredited programme, or because it states no education requirement at all and its title does not map to an occupation in the BLS data. We accept that trade deliberately. A reader shown a job that turns out to need a degree has been misled; a reader shown fewer jobs has not.

That check found three real defects, which are fixed: a preferred degree could outrank a posting’s stated minimum; the commonest phrasing of “or an equivalent combination of education and experience” was not recognised; and nursing roles whose titles omit “RN” could be published on an associate-in-nursing line, when a nursing licence is a professional licence rather than a degree-free path. The full write-up, including the confusion matrix and the limits of the measurement, is kept with our research notes.

A wrong label is a correction, and the contact page is the fastest way to report one.

Corrections

When a reader or our own checks find an error, we fix the page, note the correction at the bottom of it, and, where the error affected a number that appears on other pages, rebuild those too. Our editorial policy covers how content is produced and reviewed.