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While pharmacists have the highest average pay in Montana among jobs with at least 1,000 employees, the best-paying job in the state outside of doctors is a construction manager.
That's according to Insider's recent analysis of average annual wage data from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program. Looking at jobs in each state and Washington, DC, with at least 1,000 employees, there were many places where the best-paying job was some type of physician. In fact, just under half the states had the catchall physician category as their best-paying occupation, based on our criteria and methodology.
Because some people may not want to be a doctor but are still interested in high-paying roles where they live, we were interested in filtering out physician occupations to see how that would change the results. Insider looked at occupations aside from doctors with at least 1,000 employees and which had specific average annual wage data available. Dentists, family medicine physicians, and anesthesiologists are just a few examples of the type of doctor jobs we left out of this analysis.
As seen in the map above, chief executive was the best-paying job for 24 states and DC using our methodology. This was already the result for DC, North Carolina, and New Jersey in Insider's analysis that included all jobs with at least 1,000 employees and that didn't leave out physician titles.
Chief executive was the top-paying role based on average pay data for jobs outside of doctors and with at least 1,000 employees in both California and Wisconsin. The average for chief executives in California was $275,040, where an estimated 36,710 had this occupation in the state. $240,980 was the average in Wisconsin, with an estimated 4,060 chief executive employees. You can hover over the above map to see the average pay and estimated number of employees for states with chief executive as the top-paying role — as well as the results for other states.
While we excluded doctor jobs for this analysis, there were four states where nurse anesthetists was the top-paying job, based on average annual pay, among jobs with at least 1,000 employees and with estimates available. This included Minnesota, with an average of $222,540 and 2,460 employed for this occupation.
Computer and information systems managers was the highest-paying role, based on average pay data for jobs with at least 1,000 employees, in both Delaware and Maine. Average annual wage data for this job was $195,140 and $148,240 respectively.
