Back in 2014, NPR reported a table of the top jobs by income category. It was a super insightful snapshot that helped contextualize what sorts of occupations people have across the income spectrum.
This has been an important reference for a lot of our work at Scioto, and we thought it would be interesting to update it for Ohio. So we went to the data, and made our own list of the top 10 jobs by income category for Ohio.
This table was made using data from the American Community Survey which is collected by the Census Bureau annually. We used the five-year estimate from 2021 for this, meaning the data represented here are actually from as far back as 2017.
One interesting takeaway is how jobs that require education beyond a high school diploma are distributed across the chart. For example, the most common jobs in the six lowest income brackets don’t typically require advanced degrees. Additionally, the only category that has only jobs that typically require an additional degree is the top bracket.
Another interesting takeaway from this chart is how incomes for individual jobs are spread across multiple brackets. Because we are looking at the 10 most frequent jobs in each income group, it makes sense that we see the same jobs pop up multiple times. These are all the most common jobs, and with so many people working in these professions, there is bound to be differences in wages.
People who are laborers and freight workers stand out as having one of the most variable incomes. These jobs are very common among a range of people, from those whose income would likely mean they fall under the federal poverty line all the way to people who would probably be categorized as upper-middle class. One potential cause of this might be the role of labor unions in these industries.
One final takeaway that stood out to me is that the only income brackets that have jobs that don’t appear somewhere else are the very top and very bottom brackets. For the majority of the most common jobs in Ohio, There is a lot of variability in the potential wages. The exception is if you are at the very top or very bottom of the income distribution.
I think this is important because for most jobs, there appears to be some potential for upward mobility. While this is not universally true and depends a lot on context, it is possible for people to stay in the same industry and earn more with more experience. This may still involve changing employers, but it seems like major career changes are not the only path to higher earnings.
The exception is if people are at the very bottom or the very top of the distribution. These people have much less ability to move around without making a big career change. For the top of the distribution, this isn’t too bad. Chief executives aren’t often looking for a new vocation.
For the bottom of the income distribution, this presents a pretty significant problem. Namely that it is much harder to develop human capital when you are spending all of your time and energy just trying to get by. From a policy perspective, job training for people in these lines of work could be an avenue for reducing poverty.
Take a look for yourself at the table and see if anything interesting jumps out to you.