- There are many jobs that are both well-paid and offer a relaxing work environment.
- Using data from the Department of Labor, we found 33 jobs with annual salaries over $75,000 that also offer a relatively low-stress work situation.
Fortunately, for those who would like to work under more relaxing conditions, there are plenty of high-paying jobs that also tend to offer low-stress work environments.
The Department of Labor's $4 includes survey-based measurements of how important various skills, activities, and personal traits are for a particular job. One of the characteristics measured is $4, which O*NET describes as jobs requiring "accepting criticism and dealing calmly and effectively with high-stress situations."
O*NET scores job characteristics like stress tolerance on a scale from 0 to 100, where a 0 means stress tolerance is not at all necessary for an occupation, and 100 suggests a job with a very high-stress environment.
We ranked occupational groups from most to least stressful using O*NET's stress tolerance score, with lower scores indicating less stressful jobs. Since we are interested in high-paying jobs, we looked at occupations with average annual salaries of at least $75,000, according to the $4 data for May 2017, the most recently available release.
Several of the jobs fell in academia, with postsecondary teachers in various fields and researchers in economics, statistics, mathematics, and materials science dominating the top of the list.
Here are 33 high-paying low-stress jobs, ranked from most to least stressful, and by average annual wages in the event of a tied stress tolerance score: