Careers: Postsecondary nondegree award

This page lists the 51 BLS-tracked occupations assigned Postsecondary nondegree award in the BLS “typical education needed for entry” category, ranked by national median salary from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics May 2025 release. Leading the list is Commercial Pilots at $123,220/year, projected to grow 5% through 2034. The equal-weighted mean of the published occupation medians in this category is $62,992. It is a comparison of occupation medians, not a worker-level wage or the return from obtaining a credential.

3 of 51 occupations in this BLS category have a published median above $100,000 per year. 41 occupations in this list are projected to grow through 2034 per BLS Employment Projections, while 10 are flat or declining. Summing the published projected annual openings across the list gives approximately 1,161,100. This is an occupation-level projection sum, not a live vacancy count or an individual entry probability. Workplace safety grades shown on each row derive from BLS CFOI fatality rates and SOII injury rates, useful for roles involving fieldwork, construction, transportation, or healthcare where physical hazard matters alongside compensation.

“Typical education needed for entry” is the BLS category describing the education workers typically need to enter an occupation. It is not a legal or employer-specific requirement and does not describe every worker. Many roles on this list have alternative pathways through experience, certifications, portfolio-based entry, or higher credentials. Those pathways are context for further research; this ranking does not measure their effect on pay. Use this ranking to compare occupations that share the same BLS entry-education assignment, then open a national profile to inspect its published percentile boundaries, state and local-area variation, and employment projections. The assignment does not measure your current credential, a program's cost, or the best route for an individual. OEWS percentiles are wage boundaries, not entry or senior work-level estimates. OEWS includes tips, commissions, incentive pay, and production bonuses. Employer benefits, overtime premiums, stock compensation, and nonproduction bonuses are excluded, so compare those parts of an offer separately.