It seems pretty easy to find lists of what kind of jobs give you the highest expected income by year, but one thing such lists rarely seem to mention is how it works out when you consider expected hours worked. For eg, a career in medicine seems to require notoriously long hours, so their value is probably quite a lot lower than it looks unless you have no greater preference for your free time than to spend it working (which I guess isn't wildly unlikely for a doctor).

Other high-salary careers seem to be most types of engineering, business, accounting and finance and law. Of those, law also seems to rate a lot worse on this metric - the others I don't really know about. Does anyone have any insight?

Also, there are probably other utility-affecting metrics that aren't widely discussed. For eg geographic spread of jobs - some otherwise nice-looking ones might require you to work in a particular country (again, law seems likely to suffer from this) or even city. Or, almost the reverse, might be very specific but wildly unpredictable in where they require you to work (eg academia in general).

Another is confidence of getting *some* job, reducing the risk of ever being in a position where you regret having given so much of your income away. This at least seems to be documented on the Guardian University Subject Guide.

Looking through that guide, it seems as though on the latter metric (and excluding obviously low-pay areas like nursing), the good areas are, in roughly decreasing order,

[Medicine
Pharmacy/Pharmacology
Dentistry]
[Civil Engineering]
[Chemical Engineering
Comp Sci
Electrical Engineering
Vetinary Science
Anatomy/Physiology]
[Physics
Mechanical Engineering
General Engineering]
[Economics
Maths]

(brackets denote similar categories, so for eg there's little to choose on this criterion between the top three)

Can anyone a) provide any info on how they look by income:hours worked ratio, or b) suggest and/or provide info on any other important metrics, esp ones that don't often get considered?

Great topic, would be nice to revive it and have some data posted.

I keep thinking lawyers make about $100-$400/hr though I'm unsure if that's false advertising by the profession (I'm thinking of the interquartile range). I think doctors too can earn very much per hour, but to be ethical, doctors should read contemporary studies to update their medical knowledge.

Consultants can bring in absurd amounts of money for little work; though it depends on the consultant (and what fields?). Some speakers can charge as much as $10,000/speech; would be good to achieve such a position and donate away most to the right charities.

More reasonably, a private SAT tutor can charge $100 (at least in New Jersey).

I'm very interested in high income-per-hour jobs (and ones that are low-hours as well).

We also need to look at something more appropriate than maximum hourly rate that someone in the field can make – if for every person who earns £10k an hour another thousand earn £5 an hour (which doesn’t seem to be so far from the truth with lawyers), the profession obviously looks a lot worse. You also need to account for people who went into the field but never got a job in it at all. The obvious starting place seems like it would be the mean hourly rate, including hours spent looking for work as work, separated by the degree type each person took. But even that’s going to be an oversimplistic picture – for eg some professions might be overrepresented at the top universities (politics, for eg? Seems like you’re far more likely to become an MP in the UK with an Oxbridge degree than one from anywhere else, whereas maybe a medical degree at any reputable establishment is not much better or worse than at any other).

Surprisingly - given how much this topic overlaps with common or garden self-interest – it doesn’t seem like there’s much research done on it. I suppose part of the problem is that it changes all the time…

You can find a lot of that data for the US at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For example you can find income per hour from these two BLS programs:

http://www.bls.gov/oes/home.htm
http://www.bls.gov/eci/

They have data nationally or by state or local area, broken down into many professions, and showing mean, median, percentiles, etc. You can learn more about what is included in the data by clicking on the FAQ on the left-hand sidebar on each site.

This program will tell you a lot of other information about different jobs (includes many different metrics), including what job prospects look like:

ttp://www.bls.gov/oco/


I'm not as familiar with the UK but it looks like a lot of the info may be here: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/hub/labour ... index.html