Here is the actual list, straight from the Texas Workforce Commission’s own ranking of high-wage occupations, current as of its most recent 2023 wage data release: airline pilots, copilots, and flight engineers top the state’s table at a median annual wage of $233,909. Architectural and engineering managers are next at $165,491, followed by computer and information systems managers at $164,838, financial managers at $155,381, chemical engineers at $153,346, and petroleum engineers at $147,838. Round out the top ten with database architects ($138,092), marketing managers ($135,055), computer network architects ($132,395), and the broad “managers, all other” category ($131,841).
That is a real, sourced answer to what the headline promises, not a description of how to go find one. The rest of this piece breaks down where those numbers come from, why physicians rank even higher than any of the titles above, how pay shifts by metro, and the caveats worth knowing before you treat a wage table as a career plan.
The top of the table, occupation by occupation
The Texas Workforce Commission’s Labor Market and Career Information department publishes an annual highlights sheet of the state’s highest-paying occupations that typically require a bachelor’s degree, limited to occupations with at least 2,500 workers statewide so the figures reflect a real labor market rather than a handful of outlier jobs. Beyond the top six above, the list continues with human resources managers ($130,262), purchasing managers ($128,962), aerospace engineers ($127,870), geoscientists ($127,448), and software developers ($127,000). Computer hardware engineers ($124,632), electronics engineers outside computing ($124,446), industrial production managers ($124,377), sales engineers ($122,970), and information security analysts ($115,042) fill out the rest of the top twenty.
Medicine does not appear on that particular TWC table because physicians are reported separately and, nationally, their pay is high enough that the Bureau of Labor Statistics caps the published figure rather than releasing an exact number. The federal OEWS data for physicians puts the national median at $239,200 or more, above every title on the Texas-specific list. Surgeons, anesthesiologists, and other physician specialties are understood to sit at or near the very top of Texas’s own occupational wage tables for the same reason, even though the precise state figure is suppressed in public releases.
Why this list looks the way it does
Two forces shape the ranking. The first is national: management, medicine, law, and specialized engineering pay the most almost everywhere in the country, because those roles combine long training pipelines with high responsibility or scarce technical skill. The second is distinctly Texan: petroleum engineers ($147,838) and chemical engineers ($153,346) rank far higher on this state’s list, and in far greater numbers of workers, than they would in a state without a comparable energy and refining base. The Permian Basin and the Gulf Coast refining corridor are why those two engineering titles sit inside Texas’s top ten while they would likely fall further down a national list.
The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is the underlying survey behind almost every wage figure in this piece, whether it is published directly by BLS or republished by the Texas Workforce Commission. The two agencies cooperate rather than compete: the Texas Workforce Commission’s Labor Market and Career Information department collects much of the state’s raw data for that federal survey, so the state figures above and the federal figures are drawn from the same source, not two separate estimates.
Median versus mean, and why it matters here
Every wage figure above is a median, the point where half of workers in that occupation earn more and half earn less. That is a deliberate choice. OEWS also reports a mean (average) wage for each occupation, but the mean can be pulled upward by a small number of extremely high earners, particularly in fields like management and medicine where the highest-paid few make many multiples of the typical worker in the same title. For a Texan sizing up whether a career switch is realistic, the median is the more honest anchor, because it reflects what a typical worker in that job actually takes home, not what a handful of outliers earn.
The same job, a different number by metro
Statewide medians hide meaningful metro-to-metro variation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes separate wage releases for each major Texas metro through its Southwest regional office. In the most recent Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington release, the management occupational group carried a mean hourly wage of $68.53, with legal occupations close behind at $63.75 an hour. In the Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands release for the same period, management ran slightly lower at $67.03 an hour, with architecture and engineering occupations, not law, as the second-highest group at $52.59 an hour, a reminder that Houston’s energy and engineering base shapes its wage structure differently than Dallas-Fort Worth’s finance- and services-heavy economy.
That gap between two of the state’s largest metros, in the same occupational groups, in the same survey period, is the clearest evidence that a single statewide number can obscure what a given title actually pays where you live. Anyone comparing a job offer or weighing a move within Texas should check the metro-level release for both cities, not just the state figure.
What it takes to get there
Every occupation at the top of the Texas Workforce Commission’s list requires a bachelor’s degree at minimum, and most of the top ten (medicine, engineering, senior management) require additional years of graduate training, licensure, or work experience beyond the degree. That is worth naming plainly: the highest-paying job in the state, at $233,909 median for pilots, or the physician wages above that, are not quick wins. The Texas Workforce Commission separately tracks occupations by the education typically required to enter them, including a parallel list of well-paid associate-degree and postsecondary-certificate roles, such as radiologic technologists ($74,451 median) and dental hygienists ($89,155 median), for readers who want strong pay without a four-year commitment.
A high wage is not the same as an open door
A wage ranking says nothing about how many positions exist near you or how fast a field is hiring. The Texas Workforce Commission pairs its wage tables with employment projections through Texas Wages and Employment Projections, which lets you check expected job growth alongside current pay, and through Texas Labor Analysis, which breaks the same figures down by region. A title that pays well statewide but has few local openings, or that is projected to shrink, is a different proposition than one that pays similarly and is expanding.
Note also that these are 2023 median wages, the most recent year TWC has published in its highlights sheet as of this writing; the underlying OEWS survey is run twice yearly but state publications run on a lag, so treat the exact dollar figures as current-as-of-2023 rather than this month’s number. Check the linked PDF directly for the latest revision before using a figure in a decision that matters.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
