Entry-level salary by major in 2026, from federal data

The lowest-paid tenth of accountants and auditors earned less than $56,020 a year in May 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That figure is the closest thing federal data has to a starting salary for a Junior Accountant, and it sits about $19,000 below the number a salary-by-major chart shows for a business degree. This post gives the entry-level figure for nine fields, explains which BLS number to hold an offer against, and marks the point where the data stops being useful.

Why the salary-by-major number is not your starting salary

BLS keeps a Field of Degree page for each of 40 majors, and the headline on every one of them is a median wage for all workers holding that degree. For business it was $75,000 in 2023, across 13,736,300 workers. That population contains the graduate who started in June and the controller who has been closing books since 1994. Twenty-six percent of it holds an advanced degree.

A median built from that group answers a question about a whole career. It does not answer the question a graduate is asking, which is what the first offer looks like.

It is also a median of earnings, not of salaries. Nineteen percent of psychology degree holders worked part time in 2023, and 18 percent of education degree holders, against 15 percent across all fields; in engineering and in computer and information technology the share was 8 percent. Part-time workers are in the count and their smaller paychecks are in the median, which drags some fields down for reasons that have nothing to do with what an employer would offer you for a full-time job. A field-of-degree median describes what a population earned in a year, in whatever hours it worked.

The number that comes closer is the 10th percentile wage for the occupation you are entering. BLS reports it in one sentence on the Pay tab of every Occupational Outlook Handbook page: the lowest 10 percent earned less than X. For accountants and auditors that was $56,020 in May 2025, against an occupational median of $83,680. The distance between those two figures — $27,660 — is roughly what a career adds, and it is the distance a Junior Accountant is standing at the bottom of.

What the bottom tenth earns, by occupation

10th percentile annual wage, May 2025

The lowest-paid tenth of each occupation — the closest public proxy for entry-level pay.

Software developers		$82,460
Registered nurses		$68,940
Civil engineers		$68,240
QA analysts and testers		$61,440
Psychologists		$59,080Master's or doctoral degree typically required
Accountants and auditors		$56,020
Elementary school teachers		$47,960
Social workers		$42,790
Graphic designers		$39,520

How to read this. Each bar is the wage below which the lowest-paid 10 percent of that occupation fell in May 2025 — a floor for the occupation, not a starting salary anyone has agreed to pay you. About one worker in ten earns less than the bar. Nine earn more, including nearly every experienced person in the field. An offer that lands above the bar and well below the occupational median is an ordinary first job.

What the bar is not: it is national, and one occupation covers many markets. Civil engineers in nonresidential building construction had a median of $82,400 in May 2025, while civil engineers in the federal government had a median of $117,790 — a gap wider than the one between two seniority levels in the same firm.

The two numbers side by side

Set the major median and the occupational floor in one table and the size of the mismatch is easier to hold onto.

Left column: BLS Field of Degree pages, 2023, covering everyone in the workforce holding that degree. Right column: OOH Pay tabs, May 2025, covering everyone in that occupation. Different years, different populations, different questions — which is exactly why quoting one figure to a recruiter while picturing the other goes badly.

Two rows deserve a second look. Computer and information technology is the field where the two numbers stay closest, because the occupation it feeds pays a high floor: $82,460 at the 10th percentile against a $135,980 median for software developers, in a group whose overall median was $109,470 in May 2025 while the median for all occupations was $50,980. Engineering is the field where they diverge most, and the reason is in the next section.

Junior Accountant: what the gap is made of

The distance between $56,020 and $83,680 is not a mystery, and very little of it is patience. Some of it is licensure: every state requires CPA candidates to complete 150 semester hours of college coursework, 30 more than a usual four-year bachelor's degree, which is why so many accounting programs run five years. Some of it is the employer. Median pay for accountants and auditors in finance and insurance was $93,290 in May 2025; in accounting, tax preparation, bookkeeping and payroll services — the firms that hire the largest share of new graduates — it was $81,490.

Government pays accountants and auditors a median of $83,350, and management of companies and enterprises $91,940, both May 2025. An accounting graduate holding three offers is choosing among four different wage curves — and the data says nothing at all about which of those employers interviews more kindly or trains better.

BLS also notes that people with an associate degree, and bookkeeping and accounting clerks who meet an employer's requirements, may get junior accounting positions and advance from there. So the title on the posting is not proof of the credential behind it, in either direction.

Civil Engineer I: the roman numeral is not the variable

Civil engineers, May 2025

$68,24010th percentile annual wage

$100,840Median annual wage

380,600Jobs in 2025

6%Projected growth, 2025-35

A posting for Civil Engineer I is a posting at the bottom of that range, and BLS is direct about why the range is as long as it is. Licensure is not required for entry-level civil engineers. Engineers who provide services directly to the public typically must be licensed, and that license takes an accredited degree, a passing score on the Fundamentals of Engineering exam, several years of relevant work, and a passing score on the PE exam.

That is a dated, documented path from $68,240 toward $100,840 — more than most fields can put in front of a graduate. Then read the sector figures again: federal government $117,790, local government $113,640, state government $102,440, engineering services $100,620, nonresidential building construction $82,400, all May 2025 medians. A Civil Engineer I at a city public works department and one at a commercial contractor are not in the same market, and neither of them is in the market that the engineering major's $100,000 median describes.

Does the major decide the pay, or the occupation?

The occupation does, and it is not close. Psychology is the clearest case in the data. The field's median wage was $60,000 in 2023, but 51 percent of psychology degree holders hold an advanced degree, and psychologists — the occupation the major is named after — typically need a master's or doctoral degree. The most common occupations among psychology graduates in 2023 were elementary school teachers, managers, and social workers.

A student who takes psychology and stops at a bachelor's is not on the $60,000 curve. They are on the social worker curve, where the lowest 10 percent earned less than $42,790 in May 2025, or the teaching curve at $47,960. A major is a door onto several occupations with different floors, and the floor is the number that pays rent.

Engineering shows the same pattern from the other side. Seventy-three percent of engineering degree holders worked in occupations requiring at least a bachelor's degree in 2023, against 62 percent across all fields, and the single largest occupation among them was not any kind of engineer: it was software developer, at 9 percent, with civil engineers third at 6 percent. The degree named the discipline. The market named the job.

Which is why ranking the majors is close to useless for anyone already holding a degree. It sorts a choice you can no longer make. The occupation is still open, and so is the industry inside it — the same accounting degree points at $93,290 in finance and insurance or $81,490 in a tax practice.

The floor is one number; the openings are another

A floor tells you what the job pays if you get it. BLS publishes a second pair of figures that tells you how often it comes up: a projected employment change over ten years and, separately, an average number of openings a year. The second counts the people leaving as well as the jobs being added, and for every occupation on the chart above it is much the larger number.

BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, employment projections, 2025-35. The projected change across all occupations is 3 percent, so four of these six sit above it. What the last column does not carry is competition: BLS counts vacancies, not the applicants arriving for them.

Read the two right-hand columns together. Graphic design is projected to shrink, it has the lowest floor of the nine at $39,520, and it still expects about 16,000 openings a year, nearly all of them seats vacated by people retiring or moving into other work. Accounting runs opposite to the way it is usually sold: 5 percent growth on 1,595,200 jobs works out to fewer than 8,000 added seats a year against about 115,300 openings, so roughly nine in ten vacancies a Junior Accountant applies to are seats someone else has left. A shrinking occupation can hire steadily, and a growing one can still be hard to get into.

What this data does not tell you

BLS does not publish wages by years of experience. The 10th percentile is not a new-graduate figure; it is the lowest-paid tenth of everyone in the occupation, which mixes first-year hires with long-serving workers in low-paying metros and industries. There is no federal series for the starting salary of a Junior Accountant, and any number presented as one comes from a private survey with its own sample and its own reasons.

If you are applying for this role

Three specifics for the next application you send.

Search the titles employers post, not the one you were taught. Junior Accountant, Staff Accountant, Accountant I and Associate Accountant are the same first job at four employers. Civil Engineer I, Engineer in Training, Graduate Engineer and Assistant Project Engineer are one posting written four ways. Searching a single phrase hides most of the market from you.

Expect the band between the 10th percentile and the median, and know which end you are near. For accountants and auditors that band runs $56,020 to $83,680 (May 2025), and a first role in a tax and bookkeeping practice sits near the bottom of it. Naming the occupational median as your expected pay for a first job reads as unresearched, because it is.

Ask which pay band the requisition sits in and what moves you out of it. Employers that use levels have a written answer, and for a Civil Engineer I it is usually the PE license plus a year count. One question in the first screen tells you more about this offer than any national median can.

Once the target range is set, the rest of the work is retyping the same eight fields into forms that each want them in a slightly different order. The platform fills the application from your resume, so the time goes into the shortlist instead.