The Highest-Paying Jobs Almost Nobody Competes For

Ask a room of career changers what they are considering and you will hear the same six answers. Software engineer. Data analyst. Product manager. Nurse. Teacher. Something in marketing. These are all reasonable careers, and they are also the careers everyone else has already thought of.

Here is a number that reframes the problem. There are 1,895,500 software developers, quality assurance analysts and testers in the United States. There are 33,600 actuaries. The actuary earns a median of $125,770. The software occupation earns $131,450. Roughly the same money, in a field with about one fifty-sixth of the people.

Occupation size is the variable nobody looks at, and it quietly decides how hard your job hunt is.

Why a small occupation can be an advantage

A large occupation is not automatically bad. More jobs means more openings, more employers, more places to live and more room to move sideways. That is a real benefit and it is why big fields stay popular.

But large fields also attract the crowd. Every bootcamp, every university, every "learn this in six months" advert points at the same handful of destinations. The result is a lot of applicants per opening, particularly at entry level, and a hiring process built to reject people efficiently.

A field of 33,600 people works differently. Fewer people have heard of it, fewer have qualified, and the qualification itself does the filtering. Actuarial exams are a good example: they are difficult, they take years, and passing them is a clearer signal than any CV. When the barrier is a specific credential rather than a general impression, effort converts into access more reliably.

The honest catch

Small also means fragile and inflexible. An occupation of 13,600 wind turbine technicians produces very few openings in absolute terms even at 50 percent growth. If your city has two employers in that field and neither is hiring, the national statistics are irrelevant to you. Big fields are forgiving about geography and timing. Small ones are not.

Growth and size interact. Radiation therapist pays $101,990 on a two-year degree, which sounds like the best deal on this page, and BLS projects it growing 2 percent, which they classify as slower than average. Almost all its openings will come from people retiring rather than from new positions. That is a slower, less forgiving door.

These are not secrets, they are just unfashionable. Nobody is hiding actuarial work. It is simply that no one makes content about it, so it never enters most people's list of options.

How to use this

Do not choose a career because it is obscure. Obscurity is not a qualification and a job you dislike does not improve for being uncrowded.

Use it as a widening exercise instead. If your shortlist contains only careers you could have named at eighteen, it is a shortlist assembled from cultural visibility rather than from fit. There are 952 occupations tracked in the data behind this site and most people can name perhaps forty. The interesting ones for you are quite likely in the other 912.

That is what our assessment is for: it maps your interests and working style against the full set of occupations with current labour market data, including the ones no one has ever suggested to you.

Pay is 2024 median annual wage, employment is total jobs in 2024, and growth is the projected change from 2024 to 2034, all from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook. Each occupation was checked against its own BLS entry.