Data source and method
The Department of Labor O*NET Online occupational databaseIncludes survey-based measures of the importance of various skills, activities and personal characteristics for a job.
One of the measured characteristics is Stress tolerance, 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 occupations 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 that had stress tolerance scores available and with average annual salaries of at least $75,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment and Wage StatisticsThe most recent data release is for May 2021.
The following jobs were ranked according to their stress levels. We ranked the average annual wage in cases of tied stress tolerance scores.
Many of these jobs were in academia. The top ten list included postsecondary economists, statisticians, mathematicians, and material scientists.
Andy Kiersz contributed previously to this story.
