16 high-paying jobs you can do from home without a college degree

Not every job that you can do from home requires a college degree.SeventyFour/Getty Images

• Researchers from The University of Chicago analyzed which jobs can be done from home given their characteristics and work duties.
• Given this classification of telework jobs, we decided to look at which jobs are high-paying and can be done from home but do not require a college degree.
• Using education requirements and typical salary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we looked at jobs from the University of Chicago list that earn more than the US average annual salary and where the typical minimum education is a high school diploma or no formal education.
• Transportation managers made the top of the list with an average annual salary of $103,320 and a minimum educational requirement of a high school diploma or equivalent.

The kinds of jobs that can be done from home range from managers and supervisors to sales agents, and not all of these jobs require you to be a college graduate.

Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman from The University of Chicago researched the kinds of job that can potentially be done from home based on an occupation's characteristics and responsibilities found on The Department of Labor's Occupational Information Network (O*NET).

Using two work questionnaires on O*NET, if an occupation met conditions like a "majority of respondents say they work outdoors every day" or "performing general physical activities is very important," then the researchers classified this occupation as one that cannot be done from home. The full list of these kinds of questions can be found in their white paper.

To check this method, the researchers manually gave each occupation their own score. The O*NET and manual classifications were mostly the same, agreeing for about 85% of the jobs.

Athletes, coaches, umpires, and related workers were one of the jobs that did not match between the two assessments. The O*NET classification found these jobs can likely be done from home, while their manual classification believed these jobs are not suited for telework. Private detectives and investigators showed a similar difference.

Based on their O*NET method, they found about 37% of occupations can likely be done remotely.

Given the large number of people working from home during the pandemic, Business Insider decided to look at high-paying remote jobs that don't require a college education. To do this, we used The University of Chicago's classification of jobs that likely can be done from home based on the O*NET classification scheme and found those where the typical minimum requirement is a high school diploma or its equivalent, or does not have a particular educational requirement. Of these occupations, we looked at those that make more than $53,490, the average annual salary of all occupations as of May 2019.

The following are the 16 highest-paying jobs that you can do from home that don't require a college degree based on O*NET classifications. Education and occupational data are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.