Method

Estimates compiled 2026. Pay bands are US mid-career.

The set

80 vocations, hand-curated. The set spans trades, arts, care, food, software, farming, research, teaching, founding and skilled operations. It is deliberately not the full occupational classification: a list of nine hundred titles cannot be compared by a person in an afternoon, and most of it is variation on the same few jobs.

Where the numbers come from

• Pay floors and ceilings follow US Bureau of Labor Statistics style wage patterns and published sector compensation surveys. They are estimates, mid-career, and US-centric in this version.
• Demand outlook follows published occupational projections and observed shortage reporting, scored conservatively. A high score means durable, not booming.
• Structural fields — physical demand, hours burden, remote fit, people intensity, licence, years to competence, place constraint — follow O*NET-style occupational constructs.
• Play potential and uniqueness of mix are editorial scores. They are judgments about how practitioners describe the work and how hard the skill combination is to copy. They are labelled as editorial everywhere they appear.

Interest inventories such as RIASEC informed how the families were drawn. They are not the product, and no result here is a personality type.

The arithmetic

Each factor is computed from the record, then converted to a percentile across the whole set. A percentile of 80 means the vocation sits above four fifths of the set on that factor. Percentiles are then combined as a weighted average of your slider values, divided by the total weight. A slider at 0 removes the factor entirely.

Percentiles are always calculated across the full set, not the filtered subset, so a hard limit narrows the list without silently rescaling the scores.

The factors

• Play — Absorbing rather than merely paid.
• Specific knowledge — A combination of skills that is hard to copy.
• Leverage — Output that scales through code, media, capital or crew.
• Demand — Durability and shortage, scored conservatively.
• Pay — Mid-career floor and the range above it.
• Body — Inverse of physical demand and hours.
• Autonomy — Control of methods and time.
• People fit — Distance from your preferred people level.
• Place flexibility — Remote fit and freedom from specific metros.
• Time to skill — Inverse of years to competence.
• Meaning load — Care, craft and stewardship weight. Not a moral score.
• Downside tolerance — Inverse of named risk to body, market or platform.

Known limits

• Pay is a national band. It does not know your city, your firm, or your decade.
• Two people in the same vocation can have opposite days. The record is a median.
• Editorial scores carry the author's judgment and should be argued with.
• No score here predicts whether you will be good at the work, or stay.

Precision is deliberately limited. Scores are shown to one decimal because the underlying estimates do not support more.