Highest-paying remote jobs in 2026, by BLS data

The best-paid job in the two occupation groups where telework is common is computer and information systems manager: a median of $175,140 a year in the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook's 2025 estimate, in a group where 41.7 percent of people teleworked in August 2026 (BLS table A-42). Software developers come next at $135,980 (May 2025 wages), then actuaries at $130,000. Not one of those numbers is a remote wage. BLS does not publish one.

That is the honest shape of this question. No federal survey asks what a remote actuary earns, so no federal statistic answers it. What exists is two separate measurements — what an occupation pays, and how often people in its broad occupation group work from home — and the useful answer comes from laying them side by side while being clear about the seam between them.

Which well-paid jobs sit in a group that teleworks?

Pay, employment and projections: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook — median pay from the May 2025 wage estimates, employment counts as of 2025, projections for 2025–35. Telework rate: BLS table A-42, August 2026, not seasonally adjusted. *The 1,905,400 employment count covers software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers together; the $135,980 median is for software developers alone.

How to read this. Median means half the people in the occupation earned more than that figure and half earned less. It is not a starting salary and it is not the top of a posting's range. The last column is doing something different from the rest of the row: it is the telework rate for the entire major occupation group the title belongs to, not for the title. Computer and information systems managers and management analysts both fall inside management, business, and financial operations occupations, so they carry the same 41.7 percent. The other four sit in professional and related occupations, at 31.3 percent — where a software developer and a high school teacher share one number. That tells you how blunt an instrument the last column is.

Why the highest-paid work in America is not remote

Take the Handbook's own ranking of the highest-paying occupations and the pattern arrives immediately. Pediatric surgeons, $559,030 in 2025. Cardiologists, $496,010. Radiologists, $420,860. Twentieth on that list is nurse anesthetists at $236,590, and every entry above it is a physician, a surgeon, a dentist or an anesthetist — work performed with a patient in the room.

The three example titles in this post sit well below that cut. The highest of them, software developer at $135,980, is $100,610 short of the twentieth-ranked occupation; an actuary at $130,000 and a technical writer at $90,390 are further back still.

Pay and remote work do not correlate; they intersect in one narrow band, and that band is management, business, financial and computer work. Every list of highest-paying remote jobs, this one included, is a list of that band. Knowing it is a band rather than a ranking changes what you go looking for. You are not searching the top of the national pay scale. You are searching the top of one column of it, and the column is the useful unit.

How much telework, by occupation group

Percent of people at work who teleworked, by occupation group, August 2026

Counts anyone who teleworked or worked at home for pay during the survey reference week, whether for one hour of it or all of it.

Management, business, and financial operations		41.7%
Professional and related		31.3%
Sales and office		23.3%
Service		5.8%
Natural resources, construction, and maintenance		3%
Production, transportation, and material moving		2.9%

A rate is not a dose, and BLS measures the dose separately. In table A-44 for the same month, hours worked at home came to 28.1 percent of all hours worked in management, business, and financial operations occupations, and 21.0 percent in professional and related occupations. Average weekly hours were 40.8 and 38.4 respectively. So the group with the highest headcount rate also gives the most of its week to home — and even there, roughly seven hours in every ten are still worked somewhere that is not home.

Table A-42 separates people who teleworked some hours from those who teleworked all of them, and the split is the part most summaries drop. In management, business, and financial operations occupations in August 2026, 6,609 thousand people teleworked some hours and 5,999 thousand teleworked all hours, out of 30,225 thousand at work. The fully remote population is real and it is large. It is also the smaller of the two halves inside a headline number that gets quoted as though all of it were remote.

The professional and related group — the one holding software developers, actuaries and technical writers — splits the same way and slightly wider: 6,266 thousand teleworked some hours against 5,477 thousand all hours, out of 37,552 thousand at work. Whichever of the two groups your target title falls into, the majority of the people counted as teleworking went somewhere else for part of the week.

Which of these is growing, and which is not

Projected growth is the column readers skip, and in a remote search it is the one that decides whether the band you have just entered has doors in it. Information security analysts are projected to grow 21 percent from 2025 to 2035, from a 2025 base of 192,900 jobs. Computer and information systems managers, 16 percent on 685,800. Software developers, quality assurance analysts and testers, 10 percent on 1,905,400. Management analysts, 10 percent on 1,077,100. Actuaries, 9 percent on 31,200. Technical writers, 1 percent on 46,400.

Rate and base have to be read together, because neither alone predicts how many postings reach your screen. Actuaries are projected to grow nine times faster than technical writers, from a smaller starting count — so the faster-growing occupation is still the one with fewer people in it. And inside a single Handbook page, the title you apply under moves the median: software developers at $135,980 and quality assurance analysts and testers at $104,300, both May 2025, both counted inside the same 1,905,400 jobs. A developer who lets a recruiter file them under QA has not changed occupations on paper. They have changed which median their offer gets benchmarked against.

What these numbers do not tell you

Five things, and they matter more than the table.

The telework data stops at the major occupation group. There is no BLS telework rate for actuaries, for software developers, or for technical writers specifically. When you see one quoted to a decimal place for a single job title, it came from a job board or a private panel, not from the Current Population Survey.

BLS publishes no wage broken out by telework status. Pay is measured in one program and telework in another, and the two are never crossed, so "remote software developers earn X" is not a statement BLS has ever made. The $135,980 is the median for everyone in the occupation, on site and at home together, and there is no published way to pull the two apart.

The Handbook's medians are national and refer to May 2025 wages. A range posted in a high-cost metro will sit above them; one in a low-cost metro will sit below; a remote posting may be priced to either, or to a band the employer invented for distributed roles. Comparing an offer to a national median tells you which side of the middle it lands on. It does not tell you whether the offer is good for you.

The projections are a ten-year model, not a forecast of this hiring year. A 21 percent figure for information security analysts describes where BLS expects the occupation to sit in 2035; it says nothing about how many security postings exist this month, and a decade is long enough that a job search planned around it is planning around the wrong horizon.

And the telework rate counts hybrid inside it. Someone who worked from a kitchen table on Wednesday and commuted the other four days is counted in the 41.7 percent. That single fact is why the same statistic gets published as evidence that remote work is now normal and as evidence that it is disappearing.

What the work looks like from the inside

O*NET surveys people who hold the job about the conditions of the work, which is as close as public data gets to asking whether the job can be done from a different building. Two of the three example titles have full work-context profiles:

Work context: actuaries and technical writers

O*NET incumbent survey responses, site updated August 25, 2026. O*NET does not label occupations remote or non-remote; these describe the conditions of the work. A blank cell means O*NET does not publish that response at that frequency for that occupation.

	Actuaries (15-2011.00)	Technical writers (27-3042.00)
E-mail — every day	97%	74%
Telephone conversations — every day	48%	—
Telephone — once a week or more, not every day	—	38%
Face-to-face discussions — every day	56%	66%
Indoors, environmentally controlled — every day	91%	75%
Spend time sitting — continually or almost continually	79%	—

Read those two columns expecting a clean split and you will not get one. On daily face-to-face discussion — the row you would expect to separate a job done alone from a job done by getting an engineer to explain what the feature actually does — actuaries report 56 percent against the technical writers' 66 percent. Ten points. The sharper differences sit elsewhere: 97 percent of actuaries are in e-mail every day and 79 percent sit continually or almost continually, a job whose inputs are files and whose outputs are files, while the technical writer's phone rings on a weekly rather than a daily rhythm, 38 percent reporting calls once a week or more but not every day.

So here is the limit of the work-context data, and it is a hard one: it does not tell you which of these two jobs is more likely to be advertised as remote. O*NET describes the conditions of the work as the people holding it report them, and the people holding both of these describe an indoor desk with a mail client open. Anyone who tells you an occupation is "inherently remote" is reading a task list and calling it a policy. The employer decides where the desk goes.

One line from the Handbook belongs here too, because it is the thing remote pay figures quietly rest on. Of actuaries it says: "Most actuaries work full time, and some work more than 40 hours per week." A $130,000 median is a median for that week, not for a shorter one. Remote is a location arrangement, and the Handbook does not describe it as a lighter job.

The titles to search instead of "remote"

Searching the word remote finds the postings that used the word. Searching adjacent job titles finds the work. O*NET lists related occupations for every title, and for the example roles here the neighbours are where a large share of the unclaimed postings sit:

• For actuary: Financial Risk Specialists, Financial and Investment Analysts, Insurance Underwriters, Economists, Financial Examiners.
• For technical writer: Document Management Specialists, Editors, Writers and Authors, Clinical Data Managers, Project Management Specialists.
• For software developer: search it alongside the manager and analyst titles in the table above — computer and information systems managers is the same occupation group at a $175,140 median, and the postings often describe the same product team.

Variety is not the point of that list. An actuary who searches only "remote actuary" is searching a 31,200-person occupation, which is small enough that a slow month produces almost nothing. The same person searching financial risk specialist and insurance underwriter postings is searching several times that population, for work O*NET already classes as adjacent.

If you are applying for this role

Search the neighbouring titles before the word remote. Take two names from the O*NET related list for your occupation, run them as separate saved searches for a week, and compare what comes back; the overlap will be smaller than you expect.

Know the number you are comparing against. For a software developer it is $135,980, for an actuary $130,000, for a technical writer $90,390 — all national medians from the Handbook's May 2025 wage estimates, not metro figures and not remote-specific ones. When a posting shows a range, the question worth asking is where its midpoint falls relative to that median — not whether the top of the range beats it, since the top of a range is the number the employer is least likely to pay.

Ask one question early in the screen: is this role classified as remote, hybrid or in-office, and how many days on site are expected? The telework tables say the honest answer is frequently hybrid, and the recruiter knows which one it is long before the offer stage. A vague answer is itself an answer.

The applications are the part of this worth spending the least time on. If you are retyping the same six fields into a different form for every one of these titles, HeroApply fills the application from your resume — so the hours go into the searches that widen the funnel instead.