With tuition more than tripling between 1980 and 2022, college may not always be the most practical route for everyone. A new study has found that police sergeants and captains rank as the best-paid job that doesn’t require a degree in Arizona, with an average annual salary of $113,776.A college degree isn’t the only path to a rewarding — and high-paying — career. Whether you’re entering the workforce for the first time, considering a career change or looking for ways to increase your income, exploring degree-free career paths can open the door to new opportunities.

And there may be new opportunities that didn’t exist before. For example, public sector employers in 26 states and territories re-evaluated their requirements, with the government in Virginia alone increasing the number of no-degree jobs from 58% to 90% between 2019 and 2024. Many private firms followed suit.

So what kind of jobs should professionals without a degree look for? Online lender NetCredit analyzed Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data at a national, state and metro-area level to find the ones with the best pay overall and compared them to all jobs locally.

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Key Findings

• The highest-paid job in the U.S. that doesn’t require a degree is Nuclear Power Reactor Operator, with an average annual salary of $122,824.

• In Wyoming, workers in jobs with no degree requirement earn an average of 82.3% of the overall statewide average wage — the highest percentage of any state.

• Police Sergeants and Captains earn an average of $162,573 in California, the highest figure for any no-degree role in the state.

• The best-paid no-degree role in the New York tri-state area is the Transportation, Storage and Distribution Manager, with an average salary of $143,166.

The Methodology Behind This Study

First, NetCredit retrieved data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) 2024 Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates at a national, state and metropolitan area level. The team also identified the occupations that don’t require an associated degree as per the BLS Occupational Handbook and retrieved the average yearly salary for each role.

For the state and metropolitan area figures, they filtered out occupations that account for fewer than

0.2 per 1,000 jobs (fewer than one in 5,000 jobs). The team then isolated the best-paid no-degree jobs nationally, by state and by metropolitan area (focusing on large metropolitan areas of over one million inhabitants).

Finally, NetCredit determined the best states and metro areas for no-degree jobs based on how close the average wage for these jobs was to the local average wage (across all occupations). They used a weighted average to calculate the average wage of a no-degree job in each state to account for the large differences in employment rates by occupation.

Data is correct as of May 2026.