Work Without a Bachelor’s Degree Is 70% of U.S. Jobs. Here Is What It Actually Pays

Key findings

1. 1Occupations typically entered without a bachelor's degree account for 69.5% of U.S. employment (108,097,720 of 155,495,750 jobs).
2. 2Only 1.1% of that employment, 1,218,270 jobs, is in occupations with a median at or above $100,000.
3. 329% of it pays above the median wage across all occupations in its own state.
4. 4That local share ranges from 5.7% in District of Columbia to 34.5% in Mississippi, with a median state at 29.6%.
5. 5The four states where non-degree work most often beats the local median, Mississippi, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Indiana, are none of the states a raw-wage ranking would name.
6. 6120 distinct occupations clear $100,000 in at least one state. Counts per state run from 3 (West Virginia) to 49 (Washington), median 10.
7. 7No occupation typically entered without a bachelor's clears $100,000 in more states than commercial pilots, which does so in 41 of them, typically entered with a postsecondary nondegree award.

One row per state and the District of Columbia: the all-occupation median wage, employment in occupations typically entered without a bachelor's degree, the share of that employment paying above the state's own median, the number of such occupations clearing $100,000, and the highest published median among them.

Methodology

Wages, state employment, and the all-occupation state median come from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics May 2025 state file, via a committed, checksum-pinned snapshot (sha256 456184f482ce…).

Typical entry-level education comes from the BLS Employment Projections programme. It is a NATIONAL assignment for the occupation describing what entrants usually hold, not a legal requirement, and not a statement that any individual employer accepts it.

"Without a bachelor's" means the occupation's typical entry education is one of: no formal educational credential, high school diploma or equivalent, some college (no degree), postsecondary nondegree award, or associate degree. Every occupation in the source file falls into that set or into bachelor's-and-above; an unrecognised label fails the build rather than being silently classified.

An occupation counts toward a state only when the survey released both a wage and an employment figure for it there. Unreleased estimates are excluded from numerator and denominator alike, never treated as zero.

A wage BLS publishes only as "at or above $239,200 a year", its reporting cap, counts toward the $100,000 threshold, because the floor already clears it. It is never used as a best-paid figure, because a floor cannot be ordered against another floor.

The local measure compares each occupation's state median against that same state's median across ALL occupations, then weights by the occupation's state employment. It answers "what share of non-degree jobs here pay better than the typical job here".

Every figure in this report is recomputed by scripts/build-non-degree-pay.mjs from the two committed federal snapshots. None is hand-entered.