A common fear about the job market is that the careers growing fastest are low-wage service work, and that anything paying well is shrinking. The federal projections do not support that, but they support the cheerful version less firmly than they used to. Rank every career by projected growth and the 25 fastest-growing pay a median wage of $87,220, about $9,000 above the $77,970 median across all 393 careers tracked. That is a real premium. It is also small enough that "pick a growing field" is weak career advice on its own, because the spread inside the list dwarfs the gap between the list and everything else.
Do the Fastest-Growing Careers Still Pay More
Yes, modestly. The more useful question is which fast-growing careers pay more, because the 25 do not behave as a group. Nine of them clear $100,000. Two pay under $50,000. The distance between the best-paid and worst-paid career on the list is larger than the distance between the list's median and the national median, which means the label "fast-growing" tells you much less about pay than the education requirement sitting next to it.
The 25 Fastest-Growing Careers
Each career below is ranked by projected employment growth, with its median wage and the education typically needed to enter. Growth is the percentage change in employment across the projection window.
| Rank | Career | Growth | Median wage | Entry education |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nurse Practitioner | 41.0% | $132,300 | Master's degree |
| 2 | Data Scientist | 34.6% | $120,230 | Bachelor's degree |
| 3 | Wind Turbine Service Technicians | 29.5% | $64,120 | Nondegree award |
| 4 | Medical & Health Services Manager | 24.2% | $123,860 | Bachelor's degree |
| 5 | Physical Therapist Assistant | 23.0% | $68,380 | Associate's degree |
| 6 | Psychiatric Technicians | 22.3% | $45,130 | Nondegree award |
| 7 | Computer & Information Research Scientist | 21.8% | $140,300 | Master's degree |
| 8 | Occupational Therapy Assistant | 21.5% | $72,300 | Associate's degree |
| 9 | Ophthalmic Medical Technicians | 21.4% | $45,570 | Nondegree award |
| 10 | Physician Assistant | 21.1% | $135,880 | Master's degree |
| 11 | Information Security Analyst | 21.0% | $129,180 | Bachelor's degree |
| 12 | Occupational Health and Safety Technicians | 19.4% | $61,560 | High school diploma |
| 13 | Hearing Aid Specialists | 19.4% | $65,160 | High school diploma |
| 14 | Epidemiologists | 18.7% | $87,220 | Master's degree |
| 15 | Occupational Health and Safety Specialists | 18.5% | $90,150 | Bachelor's degree |
Health and data lead the growth
Projected employment growth, top six fastest-growing careers
Positions 16 through 25 hold the shape: health specialties teachers, industrial machinery mechanics, logisticians, nursing instructors, speech-language pathologists, health information technologists, computer and information systems managers, massage therapists, occupational therapists, and diagnostic medical sonographers. The striking pattern across the whole list is how much of it is healthcare. Fifteen of the 25 are health roles of some kind, from nurse practitioners at the top to sonographers at the bottom. Technology contributes four. Finance contributes none.
The Real Divide Is Education, Not Growth
Split the 25 by entry requirement and the list separates into two populations that barely overlap on pay. The 14 careers needing a bachelor's degree or more pay a median of $113,770. The 11 that need less pay $64,520. That gap of roughly $49,000 is more than five times the $9,000 advantage the whole list holds over the wider job market.
That is the finding worth carrying away. Growth and pay do travel together, but education is doing most of the pulling. A student picking among these careers is mostly deciding how many years of schooling to trade for the higher wage, not whether a growing field can pay at all. The sub-bachelor's group is a genuine opportunity rather than a consolation: diagnostic medical sonographers reach $96,590 on an associate degree, and wind turbine technicians grow at 29.5% on a nondegree award. Both sit well above the national median wage. They simply do not reach the six figures that the bachelor's-and-above group treats as normal.
How We Measured This
Growth is the projected percentage change in employment for each occupation across the federal projection window, matched to occupations by SOC code. Median wage is the national median annual wage for the same occupation. The ranking covers every career reporting both a growth projection and a median wage, 393 in total, sorted by growth and cut at the top 25. Entry education is the level typically needed to enter the occupation, not the level every worker holds. Full method and source vintages are on the methodology and data sources pages.
What the Numbers Do Not Say
A growth rate is a percentage, and percentages hide scale. Wind turbine service technicians grow 29.5% off a base of about 9,980 jobs, which works out to roughly 2,900 new positions across the decade. Software developers grow at a third of that rate, 10.2%, off a base of 1.69 million, which is roughly 172,000 new positions. The slower-growing occupation adds nearly sixty times as many jobs. A high growth rate marks a field on the rise; it does not tell you how many doors will be open.
These are also forecasts, and this release moved them hard. Wind turbine service technicians fell from 49.9% to 29.5% and lost the top spot. Actuaries fell from 21.8% to 9.2%. Software developers fell from 15.8% to 10.2%. Nothing about those occupations changed in a year; the projection did. Treat any single figure here as an estimate with real uncertainty attached, and treat the ordering as more durable than the exact percentages.
What This Means for Students
You rarely have to choose between a field that is growing and one that pays, but you do have to choose how much schooling you are willing to do. That is the decision this list actually puts in front of you, and it is worth making deliberately rather than by default. Healthcare dominating 15 of the 25 slots also means the safest-looking growth is concentrated in one sector, which is its own kind of risk if you have no interest in clinical work. Before committing to a major, trace it forward to the careers it feeds and read their growth and pay together, which is what the Career Path Explorer is built for. If you want the growth without the four-year path, the six-figure careers without a bachelor's degree finding maps the high-pay roles that skip it.
What This Means for Career-Changers
If you are switching fields, read growth and entry education together, because a growing field hires more and the entry requirement decides how long you wait to get paid. Several careers here open through an associate degree or a nondegree award, which makes a mid-career move realistic without starting a four-year degree over. Weigh the schooling each path demands against the wage it returns, and treat the growth rate as a tiebreaker between two fields you would otherwise enter equally rather than as the deciding factor. To see which of these careers connect to majors you could finish quickly, the finding on majors with high pay and high growth pairs the field of study with the job market it leads into, and the Match Quiz helps narrow the schools that teach them.
