Earnings by education level: how much more a degree pays

If you want to know how much more a degree is linked to in pay, the cleanest official yardstick is the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) table of median weekly earnings by education level. This guide gives you the latest figures, shows how to turn them into a yearly number you can compare with an offer, and explains why your own pay can land far from the typical figure for your degree.

It is for anyone weighing what education level means for pay, or anyone who just wants to see the gap in hard numbers. You can find more data stories like this on our pay trends page.

Median weekly earnings by education level, 2025

BLS publishes this table every year from the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly survey of households run for BLS by the Census Bureau. The newest annual edition covers 2025, and BLS last updated it in September 2026.

Two terms to know before you read it:

• Median weekly earnings is the middle value. Line up every worker in a group from lowest to highest pay, and the median is the person in the middle: half earn more, half earn less. BLS uses medians because a few very high earners can drag an average up, but they barely move the middle.
• Full-time wage and salary workers are employees (private sector or government) who usually work 35 hours or more a week at their main job. Self-employed people are left out entirely, whether or not their business is incorporated. The table covers people age 25 and over and counts only the highest level of education each person has finished.

"Usual weekly earnings" means pay before taxes and deductions, including overtime, commissions or tips the worker normally gets.

Source: BLS Education pays table. The "compared with" column is our own subtraction from the BLS medians.

A few things jump out:

• Each step up is linked to higher median pay. The bachelor's median is about 63% above the high school median. The doctoral median is almost two and a half times the high school figure.
• Associate's degrees sit closer to high school than to bachelor's. The associate's median is $169 a week above high school, while the bachelor's is $443 a week above the associate's.
• The top two are nearly tied. Doctoral and professional degrees (think law, medicine, dentistry) were only $13 a week apart in 2025.

A caveat that is specific to 2025

BLS flags that its 2025 annual figures are averages of 11 months, not 12. October 2025 data were never collected because of the federal government shutdown, so BLS says the 2025 annual estimates are not strictly comparable with other years. The numbers are still the best official figures available. Just treat small year-to-year changes involving 2025 with some caution.

Turning weekly earnings into a yearly figure

Offers and salary bands are usually quoted per year, so you will probably want to convert. BLS does not publish an annual figure in this table, so any yearly number is your own estimate. The simple method is to multiply by 52.

Example (our calculation, not an official BLS annual figure):

Using the same method, the weekly gap between a bachelor's and a high school diploma ($612) works out to roughly $31,824 a year.

Why the yearly number is only a rough guide:

• It assumes pay for every week of the year. Someone who changes jobs mid-year or takes unpaid leave would not earn 52 full weeks.
• It only captures pay the person "usually" gets. Overtime, commissions and tips count if they are regular. An annual bonus that is not part of usual weekly pay may not show up.
• It is pre-tax. Take-home pay will be lower.
• It is the middle of a crowd, not a person. Multiplying a median by 52 does not give you the median annual salary of everyone with that degree, because people's hours and weeks worked vary.

If you want an hourly comparison, divide the weekly figure by your usual hours. Example: $1,578 divided by 40 hours is about $39.45 an hour. That is a rough illustration only, since BLS counts anyone working 35 hours or more as full time.

How the gap has changed over time

There are two ways to look at the trend, and they tell slightly different stories. Both are worth knowing before you quote a "college premium" to anyone.

The detailed table, 2013 versus 2025

BLS published the same table for 2013 in its Career Outlook series. Putting it next to 2025:

Figures are in current dollars, not adjusted for inflation. Gaps are our subtraction.

What changed:

• The dollar gap got bigger at every level. A bachelor's holder's median lead over a high school graduate grew from $457 to $612 a week.
• The percentage gap got a bit smaller. In 2013 the bachelor's median was about 70% above high school; in 2025 it was about 63% above. High school earnings grew faster in percentage terms over this stretch (about 48%) than bachelor's earnings (about 42%).
• Professional and doctoral swapped places. In 2013 professional degrees had the highest median. In 2025 doctoral degrees edged ahead, mainly because professional degree earnings rose more slowly (about 34%).

So if someone tells you the degree premium is "shrinking" or "growing," they can both be right, depending on whether they mean percentages or dollars.

The quarterly series, 2000 to 2026

BLS also tracks four broader groups every quarter going back to 2000. Comparing the third quarter of selected years:

Sources: BLS chart data, 2000 to 2026 and, for the Q3 2026 row, the Q3 2026 Usual Weekly Earnings release. Percentages are our calculation.

On this measure, the relative premium for "bachelor's and higher" has swung around, from a low of about 70% in the third quarter of 2003 to a high of about 86% in the third quarter of 2010. It has eased since 2019 and in 2026 sat close to where it was in 2000. Meanwhile the dollar gap roughly doubled, from $390 a week in the third quarter of 2000 to $767 in the third quarter of 2025. Note that this group lumps bachelor's and advanced degrees together, which is why it is higher than the bachelor's-only figure in the annual table.

Raises versus prices right now

The latest quarterly release, published October 21, 2026, adds useful context for anyone talking about a raise. In the third quarter of 2026, the typical full-time worker of any age made $1,232 a week, a rise of 1.5% over the same quarter a year before. Consumer prices (CPI-U) climbed 3.5% across that same year. In plain terms, the typical paycheck did not keep up with prices that year, whatever the education level.

Why medians hide wide ranges within each degree level

A median tells you where the middle is. It tells you nothing about how spread out everyone else is. For that, BLS publishes percentiles (it calls them deciles and quartiles): the 10th percentile is the pay level that 10% of workers fall below, the 25th is where a quarter fall below, and so on up to the 90th.

Here is the spread for the third quarter of 2026, full-time workers age 25 and over:

Source: BLS Usual Weekly Earnings, Q3 2026, Table 5. These quarterly figures are not seasonally adjusted and will not match the 2025 annual table exactly.

What this means in practice:

• The ranges overlap a lot. A high school graduate at the 75th percentile ($1,402) out-earns a bachelor's holder at the 25th percentile ($1,091). A high school graduate at the 90th percentile ($1,941) earns about the same as the median advanced-degree holder ($1,932).
• Ranges get wider as education rises. For bachelor's-only workers, the 90th percentile is about 4.6 times the 10th. For high school graduates, it is about 3.3 times.
• There are gaps by sex within each level. Among advanced-degree holders, men's median was $2,300 a week and women's was $1,759. The top 10% of men with advanced degrees earned $4,985 or more a week, compared with $3,572 or more for women.

Example: Say you have a bachelor's degree and earn $72,000 a year. Divide by 52 and you get roughly $1,385 a week. That is below the Q3 2026 bachelor's-only median of $1,602, but comfortably inside the middle half of bachelor's-only earners ($1,091 to $2,396). You are not "underpaid for your degree" on this evidence alone. You would need role, city and experience data to judge that.

Correlation, not a promise

These tables show that people with more education tend to earn more. They do not show that a degree caused the difference, and they cannot tell you what you personally will earn. People who finish more school also differ in many other ways, including the jobs they choose, where they live, how long they have worked and the hours they put in. BLS itself notes that location, experience and hours worked also shape earnings, and that the categories ignore apprenticeships and on-the-job training.

Field and occupation matter more than the degree alone

The single biggest reason for those wide ranges is what people actually do for a living. Two people with the same degree can work in fields with very different pay.

The Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) breaks bachelor's degree holders out by field of study. Its July 2025 report, using 2022 data, found these median annual earnings:

Source: Census Bureau: Field of Bachelor's Degree Report.

That is a gap of more than $68,000 a year between the top and bottom fields shown, all at the same degree level. Keep in mind that this is a different survey from the BLS table, it measures annual rather than weekly earnings, and it is a few years older, so do not mix these numbers directly with the BLS medians.

Census also reports that pay for the same field varies by place. In its 2023 release on 2022 data, general business degree holders had median earnings of $114,500 in the San Francisco area, compared with $64,860 in the Miami area and $80,120 nationally. If you want to dig into how location shifts pay, see our salaries by city coverage. For pay by specific job, our salaries by role pages are a better guide than any education average.

What this means for your pay conversations

National education medians are good for perspective and weak as negotiation evidence. A hiring manager sets pay against the role, the level, the local market and the internal pay band, not against a national average for your degree.

Here is how to use the data well:

• Use it to sanity-check, not to anchor. If your pay sits far below the 25th percentile for your education level, that is a signal to research your role's market rate more closely.
• Lead with role and city data. Bring pay figures for the job title in your area, published salary ranges where the law requires them, and your specific skills.
• Bring up your degree only when the job uses it. If the posting requires or prefers a master's or a license that comes with a professional degree, that is relevant. If it does not, it rarely moves the number.
• Quote figures with their year. Saying "BLS's 2025 median for master's holders was $1,876 a week" sounds informed. A vague "people with master's make way more" does not.

Short scripts you could adapt:

"The posting lists a master's as preferred, and I have one, plus the project experience the role calls for. Based on what I'm seeing for this title in this market, I'd like to talk about the upper part of the range."

"I've looked at market data for this role locally, and my current pay sits toward the low end. I'd like to understand how the band for this position is set and what it would take to move toward the midpoint."

"Typical pay hasn't kept pace with prices over the past year. I'd like my review to reflect both my results and the change in cost of living."

For more ways to frame these conversations, see our negotiation guides.

What to do next

• Check the source tables yourself. BLS updates the annual Education pays table once a year (the 2025 edition appeared in late summer 2026) and the Usual Weekly Earnings release every quarter.
• Convert your own pay to weekly. Divide your annual salary by 52 and see where it falls in the percentile table for your education level.
• Then get specific. Compare your pay with data for your job title and metro area, which will tell you far more than your degree level does.
• Recheck before you quote. When a new year's table comes out, swap in the new figures and label them with their year.