Top 50 Highest Paying Jobs in the World

As a Career portal, we aim to provide our readers with useful guides on jobs, training, career tips and more. In this post, we have tried our best to compile the list of the top 50 highest-paying jobs in the world across industries.

We have used for our research some of the top job portals like Indeed. We have checked upon the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Wikipedia, Investopedia and more for data. We have also checked data on salary websites like Payscale, Glassdoor etc.

We have ensured that we leave you with a lot of data and resources to explore the highest-paying careers. Whether you are a fresh graduate or someone looking for a career change, this guide is sure to be of some help to you. 

So, let’s begin exploring some of the best-paid job roles in the world.

In order to keep this listing short and informative, we have listed resources for further exploration.

For ease of our readers, we have clubbed a few professions to cover a lot more job positions and to provide wider coverage. Due to this reason, we have not strictly stuck to rankings in terms of median salaries as these change year on year and from country to country. We have tried to list them in terms of accuracy to our best knowledge. 

If you are in the USA and looking for one of the best career paths with best career progression and salaries, you must first start your research with the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Even for candidates from other nationalities, this website gives great insight into what to expect in the future. It would help you answer a few questions like.

• Which are the best upcoming careers or jobs in the world?
• Which are the best occupations in the world in terms of median salaries?
• What is the future outlook of a certain occupation?

And much more.

Just to set the tone right, here’s an example of what you can expect from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) website. 

For example, if you are a fresh graduate looking for a career option, you might make a search on the BLS Occupation Finder and explore for rich data. One snapshot from the website below to display what data you can expect.

BLS occupation finder gives you the median salary, upcoming jobs, projected growth rate, education requirement and more.

Have a look at the snapshot below for more ideas on the same. 

Let’s now begin with some of the occupations with maximum salary as listed by Investopedia. These are:

1. Surgeons – One of the best-paid jobs in America and all across the world. 

2. Psychiatrists– Paid extremely well across the globe. They are in greater demand now with the COVID-19 pandemic and increasing cases of mental disorders, anxiety etc.

3. Other Doctors and Physicians– Yes, the medical industry has maximum of the best jobs in America and in most parts of the world. So, if you are looking for a career with an excellent salary then this industry must be in your scheme of things. 

4. Dentists– And One more to mention from the medical fraternity who are in high demand.

5. Information System Managers– Now, this is no surprise as you might have already guessed. We will find a lot more from the Information Technology industry on this list.

6. Architectural Engineers– Another occupation which pays handsomely, especially in the USA.

7. Petroleum Engineers

8. Judges and Magistrates– This should also not be a surprise as the job of magistrates is one of the job roles with the best perks.

9. Marketing Managers

10. Sales Managers

The median salaries of all the above mentioned occupations range between $125,000- $252,000.

For median salaries and more jobs similar in nature to those mentioned above, please have a look at the infographic shared below.

Now coming to the next set of best-paid careers in the world.

We have clubbed a lot of IT jobs here for the ease of our readers.

As we all know the technology industry is one of the fastest growing sectors. Some of the fastest growing technology jobs are also extremely well-paid. 

You might find quite a few jobs that don’t even require a degree and are included on various lists of highest paying careers. Some of these extremely well-paid options that don’t require a specific degree are Air Traffic Controller, Real Estate Broker, Bloggers, Social Media Influencers and more.

Now moving on to the next set of top-earning jobs in the world.

Here we have listed some of the top technology jobs that are among the job roles with the highest salaries in the world.

11. Artificial Intelligence Manager – Median Salary of close to $146,000 in the USA. Very well-paid job across the globe and one of the topmost job positions in developing IT hubs like India.

12. IT Program Manager

13. Java Developer

14. Data Scientist- One of the fastest growing and extremely competitive ones. Needless to mention it is a handsomely paid job role as well. 

15. Systems Manager

16. UX Manager– Extremely innovative job role that is becoming more and more popular with each passing year. Expect this role to earn more in the future and the demand for this occupation is expected to soar higher as well.

17. Site Reliability Engineer– Another occupation that is seeing rapid growth.

18. Cloud Engineer / Cloud Architect

19. Analytics Manager

20. Computer Research Scientists 

One of the listings by Glassdoor for the highest paying jobs in 2019, includes a majority of the listed IT jobs here in their top 25 list. 

While the medical and IT industries are some of the fastest-growing ones, these are not the only ones offering highly rewarding careers in the world. 

So, we take a look at a few of the careers with excellent salaries which fall outside the IT and medical industry. 

If you are not from the USA and would like to know the salary of any particular role listed in this article, Payscale is an extremely reliable resource.

To elaborate, let’s say you are looking for highest highest-paid jobs in India and find Management Consultants as one of them, All you need to do is to visit the Resource page of Payscale and make a quick search. Similarly, for Australians, you can visit the website of Payscale or Indeed and check salary for the position and country of your interest.

On payscale, You would come up with your answers regarding the salary and scope just like the snapshot given below.

This can be done for the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and a majority of the countries in the world from this very website.

Let’s now list some of the jobs with the best remunerations that fall outside the medicine and IT industries.

21. Architect 

22. Marketing Director

23. Sales Head – The salary varies across industries dramatically and depends a lot on experience, expertise and negotiation capabilities. 

24. Director of Operations

25. Financial Planning / Analysis Manager

26. Management Consultants – The salary of Management consultants varies depending on role, industry, location and seniority. A Partner consultant or a Principal Consultant would have an extremely high salary while a consultant with 1-2 years of experience would earn relatively less. 

27. Midwife and Nurse– (These are extremely well paid in the USA and other developed countries like Germany, United Kingdom etc. and are not necessarily best paying jobs in developing countries)

28. Aeronautical Engineer

29. Lecturer / Professor

30. Executive Chef – The salaries would vary immensely in the hospitality and food service industry. Chef jobs are normally the most lucrative and best-paid jobs in hospitality. 

31. Attorney

32. Scientist

33. Project Manager

34. Resort Manager/Hotel General Manager– Normally luxury hotels pay extremely well for these roles but the average salary is dragged down due to the high pay variance between a 1-star or a 2-star and a 5-star property. 

35. Public Relations Head (PR Manager)

36. Purchasing Manager

37. Auditor

38. Chartered Accountant

39. Business Development Manager

40. Mobile Engineer

Now coming to a final few occupations with maximum salary in the USA and around the globe which are also extremely popular globally. 

We have compiled this final list from Forbes which also includes the topmost job roles of 2021 by Glassdoor. These are almost unchanged in 2023 as well.

These are:

41. Human Resources Manager (HR Manager)– One of the most popular and extremely well-paid roles. This continues to be one of the favourite occupations across the globe.

Most of the top job roles in 2023 are dominated by the IT industry. However, numerous jobs from other industries continue to show an upward trajectory in terms of salaries and growth.

Conclusion:

Yes, we have missed a lot of extremely well-paid jobs from across the globe. And that is the reason we listed a lot of resources for you to explore further.

However, we will leave with a promise that we will continue updating this space for relevant and up-to-date information about occupations with the highest salaries. We will continue to add more resources to make it even more interesting and informative. So, please keep coming back.