The most common jobs in America, and the rarest

The most common jobs

Home health and personal care aides are the most common job in the United States: 4,305,810 wage and salary workers in May 2025, about 1 in 36 jobs, in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. Retail salespersons (3,897,860) and fast food and counter workers (3,854,050) follow, then general and operations managers (3,503,020) and registered nurses (3,379,720).

The ten most common jobs hold 21.1% of all 155.5 million jobs, and the top 20 hold 32.2%. Many of them are among the lowest paid: the median fast food and counter worker earned $31,200 a year, while software developers, 15th by headcount, had a median of $135,980.

The rarest jobs

At the other end are occupations with a few hundred workers. Wood patternmakers are the rarest in the federal count, with about 220, followed by timing device assemblers and adjusters (250), wood model makers (280) and farm labor contractors (310). Industrial-organizational psychologists (790) and prosthodontists (870) are the rarest of the professions, and only 130 single occupations have fewer than 10,000 workers.

Treat these small counts as rough. Their relative standard error is often 20% to 35%, and the survey counts only wage and salary workers in nonfarm businesses, so jobs that people often do on their own account, such as farm labor contracting or animal breeding, look rarer here than they are. Catch-all “all other” groups are left out of the ranking because each combines several jobs.

How rare is your job?

The lookup above covers all 830 occupations the survey publishes. Type part of a title, such as nurse, electrician or teacher, and pick your job to see how many people hold it, how that compares with all U.S. jobs, and its median pay. Add your annual pay to see roughly where it falls among others in the same job and across all jobs; the comparison interpolates between the published 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles.

What U.S. jobs pay

Across all jobs, the median annual pay was $50,980 in May 2025: half of jobs paid less. One in 10 paid less than $31,200, a quarter less than $37,590, three in four less than $80,520, and nine in 10 less than $128,560. The average, $69,770, sits well above the median because a minority of jobs pay far more. The five best-paid occupations were all physicians and surgeons, led by pediatric surgeons at a median of $559,030.

Where the numbers come from

Employment and wages are the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ national estimates for May 2025, from a survey of employers covering wage and salary workers in nonfarm establishments. It does not count the self-employed, owners and partners in unincorporated firms, household workers or unpaid family workers. Employment is rounded to the nearest 10, and some occupations publish hourly pay only. Every occupation, with its margin of error and pay percentiles, is in the CSV above.