The majority of the most lucrative professions nationwide are medical jobs, including physician, surgeon, anesthesiologist, and dentist. Some of the highest-paying non-medical jobs are chief executive officer (CEO), information systems manager, lawyer, and pilot.What job pays the most money?
How to make 300k a year?
Most jobs that pay over $200k a year include doctors and lawyers, two fields that require education beyond a bachelor's degree, additional licensing, and specialized training.
Corporate Executive Corporate executives, such as CEOs and CFOs, oversee company operations, strategy, and financial performance. They need strong leadership, strategic thinking, and financial acumen. Most executives have advanced degrees and extensive managerial experience.
Key takeaways
If you're earning $200,000 per year, you've reached elite status in this country. That's more than double the median income of American households, which per the latest U.S. Census data is $80,610.
Earning $700,000 a year would put your household in the top 1% nationwide — and well above the middle class — and in any state in the South or Midwest. But that still won't cut it in seven states. The Northeast dominates the rankings, with five of the 10 states with the highest 1% thresholds lying in this region.
Making a million dollars a year or more puts you in the top 0.1% of income earners in the world. A top 1% income is over $700,000 today in America. With such an income, you should eventually have at least a top 1% net worth of over $13 million per person.
Basketball: The Uncontested Leader
With an average annual salary of $10.5 million in 2023, it's clear why basketball is considered the gold standard for professional athletes. The NBA benefits from lucrative television contracts, global merchandising, and high attendance rates.
As of Jan 5, 2025, the average annual pay for a Ceo in California is $140,814 a year. Just in case you need a simple salary calculator, that works out to be approximately $67.70 an hour. This is the equivalent of $2,707/week or $11,734/month.
Flight Attendants made a median salary of $68,370 in 2023. The best-paid 25% made $86,610 that year, while the lowest-paid 25% made $49,690.
Medicine comes out top. Half of doctors in the US earn over $200,000 per year, and the mean is actually higher than finance and law. That said, the very highest-earning people are in finance and law. The top 1% in finance earn over $2m per year.
The table below provides data on wages of Americans from the Social Security Administration. For 2022, the average wage for working Americans was $61,136. The average wages of those in the top 1 percent of wage earners were $785,968 that year.
Shohei Ohtani just signed a record-setting 10-year, $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers. (The previous record? Mike Trout's 12-year, $426.5 million deal.) Even I can do that math: Ohtani will earn $70 million per year.
Middle class is defined as income that is two-thirds to double the national median income, or $47,189 and $141,568. By that definition, $100,000 is considered middle class. Keep in mind that those figures are for the nation. Each state has a different range of numbers to be considered middle class.
The income of those in the top 1% is many multiples above that of the average American. According to a Congressional Budget Office report, you need at least $787,712 in income per year to make the top 1%, but this varies by where you live.
How much is 6 figures? 6 figures is any salary between $100,000 and $999,999, or a dollar amount with 6 digits. Similarly, a 7-figure salary means you make $1 million to $9,999,999, because there are 7 digits in those numbers; $10 million to $99,999,999 is an 8-figure salary.
Is $100,000 Salary a Middle Class Income? This depends on your household size and location. For a single individual, $100,000 would actually put you in the upper-income level in most places. For household sizes between two and four, $100,000 a year would put you squarely in the middle class.
A salary of $300,000 is substantially higher than the national average and certainly a “good” salary for a single person in 2024 by most peoples' reckoning. That said, no matter how much you earn, bad financial habits can bite you in the long run, so don't forget about your budget.
NerdWallet suggests spending no more than 10% of your take-home pay on a car loan payment and no more than 20% for total car expenses — which also includes things like gas, insurance, repairs and maintenance.