What Can You Do With a Finance Degree? 11 Jobs Ranked by Pay

What can you do with a finance degree? Work anywhere money is analyzed, lent, invested, insured, regulated or managed. That sounds broad because it is. The useful way to read the 11 finance degree jobs is as four families, because the family shapes your working day far more than the job title does.

• Analysis: financial and investment analysts, financial risk specialists, budget analysts and credit analysts. You build models, evaluate investments, price risk, or decide whether a borrower is good for the money.
• Client and sales work: personal financial advisors, securities, commodities and financial services sales agents, and loan officers. Your pay often depends on the clients you bring in and keep.
• Oversight and control: financial examiners, accountants and auditors, and insurance underwriters. You check that the books, the institution or the risk are what they claim to be.
• Management: financial managers, the category BLS uses for controllers, treasurers and finance officers who run the finance function. This is where the other families tend to lead, after years rather than months.

Every one of those 11 lists a bachelor's degree as the typical entry-level education in the BLS projections table. That is the good news and the catch at the same time. Your degree gets you past the first filter for all of them, and so does every other finance graduate's. What separates finance degree jobs from each other is what comes after the diploma: prior experience, on-the-job training and, in the client-facing roles, licenses.

Here are all 11 finance degree jobs, sorted by national median wage. Growth is the BLS projected change in employment from 2025 to 2035, against a 3.5 percent average for all occupations. Openings are the average number of positions BLS expects to come open each year, and that count includes jobs left behind by people who retire or change careers, not only newly created ones.

Two things stand out. First, the middle of this table sits higher than most people expect. The median of the 11 medians is $91,640, budget analysts, and even the lowest-paying job on the list clears the all-occupations median of $50,980 by about 50 percent. Second, the pay order and the hiring order barely line up. Financial risk specialists rank second on pay and open about 4,800 positions a year. Accountants and auditors rank seventh on pay and open about 115,300.

A note on the analyst row, since it will not match every source you read. BLS publishes financial and investment analysts and financial risk specialists as two separate occupations, but its Occupational Outlook Handbook profiles them together under the single heading of financial analysts. Combined, the two open about 29,500 positions a year, which is the figure our guide on how to become a financial analyst uses. Split apart, as in the table above, it is 24,700 and 4,800.

Financial managers top the list at a $166,570 median, and the highest-paid 10 percent of them earn more than $323,270. They also carry a requirement no other job on this list shares: BLS lists five years or more of work experience in a related occupation as typical for entry. The Handbook is specific about where that experience usually comes from, naming another business or financial occupation such as accountant, securities sales agent or financial analyst. That makes the best-paid of all finance degree jobs a destination, not a starting point.

The bottom of that occupation shows how far above the others it sits. The 10th percentile wage for financial managers is $94,310, meaning nine in ten of them earn more than that. That threshold alone is higher than the median wage in seven of the other ten jobs on the list. The how to become a financial manager guide lays out the typical route up, and financial manager salary breaks the full distribution down.

If you want the highest pay available without that experience requirement, three jobs stand out, and BLS lists no prior work experience for any of them. Financial risk specialists earn a $117,330 median, personal financial advisors $105,070, and financial and investment analysts $102,740. Those are the three highest-paying finance degree jobs a new graduate can apply for directly. Keep in mind what a median measures, though. It describes the whole workforce, including people twenty years in, so it is a picture of where the job can take you rather than what it pays in your first year.

Nine of the 11 finance degree jobs list no prior work experience at all. Loan officers list less than five years, and financial managers, as covered above, list five or more. So the realistic entry-level finance degree jobs are the other nine, and the more useful question is which of them gives a new graduate the firmest footing.

BLS does not publish starting salaries. The closest thing it offers is the 10th percentile, the wage that only one worker in ten earns less than. Read that way, the analysis family has the firmest floors: $64,820 for financial risk specialists, $63,720 for financial and investment analysts, and $62,250 for budget analysts. The client and sales family has the lowest: $50,190 for personal financial advisors, $48,040 for securities, commodities and financial services sales agents, and $39,430 for loan officers.

Training time matters as much as the floor. BLS lists long-term on-the-job training as typical for financial examiners and personal financial advisors, and moderate-term training for insurance underwriters, loan officers and securities sales agents. Financial and investment analysts, risk specialists, budget analysts, credit analysts and accountants list no on-the-job training beyond the degree. Put simply, the analyst jobs expect your coursework to have done most of the preparation, while the examiner and advisor jobs plan on a long stretch of training after you are hired.

That makes the analyst track the steadiest place to start for a graduate who wants a predictable salary, and it favors students who can already show modeling and spreadsheet work. The financial analyst salary page shows how that $102,740 median spreads out from the first rung to the top.

Against the 3.5 percent average for all occupations, the growth outlook for finance degree jobs splits cleanly into three groups for 2025 to 2035.

• Faster than average: financial managers (10 percent), financial examiners (9 percent), financial and investment analysts (7 percent), financial risk specialists (7 percent), and accountants and auditors (5 percent).
• Slower than average: budget analysts (2 percent), personal financial advisors (1 percent), securities, commodities and financial services sales agents (1 percent), and loan officers (1 percent).
• Shrinking: credit analysts and insurance underwriters, both projected to lose about 4 percent of their jobs.

The surprise is the advisor row. Personal financial advisor is the job most people picture when they ask what can you do with a finance degree, and BLS now projects it to grow just 1 percent, from about 299,400 jobs in 2025 to 303,500 in 2035. The previous round of projections had it well above average, so this is a real change in the federal outlook, not a rounding difference. The occupation still opens about 17,100 positions a year because people leave it, but the growth story that used to sell this path no longer shows up in the numbers.

That openings figure carries the second lesson: shrinking does not mean closed. Credit analysts are projected to lose about 2,800 jobs over the decade and still open about 3,100 positions a year, because BLS counts replacement openings as well as new ones. Insurance underwriters are projected to lose about 4,800 jobs and still open about 6,800 a year. A shrinking occupation is a harder place to build a long career. It is not an impossible place to get hired.

Add all 11 together and they open roughly 297,000 positions a year. Accountants and auditors account for about 115,300 of those, close to four in ten, which makes accounting the largest single pipeline among finance degree jobs by a wide margin. Keep that in mind when you pick electives, for a reason the licensing section below explains.

A median tells you where the middle sits. For these 11 jobs, the more revealing number is how far apart the top and bottom are, because that gap varies enormously by family. Divide each job's 90th percentile by its 10th and the three widest spreads all belong to the client-facing jobs:

• Personal financial advisors: $50,190 to $357,020, about 7.1 times.
• Securities, commodities and financial services sales agents: $48,040 to $212,880, about 4.4 times.
• Loan officers: $39,430 to $153,180, about 3.9 times.

The analysis jobs sit much tighter. Budget analysts run from $62,250 to $136,660, about 2.2 times, and financial and investment analysts from $63,720 to $180,860, about 2.8 times. Part of the reason shows up in how BLS describes advisor pay. Advisors at financial services firms are often paid a salary plus bonuses, while those at investment or planning firms, or working for themselves, either charge a flat fee or earn commissions on the products they sell. BLS includes commissions and production bonuses in its wage figures, so when pay follows the book of business you build, the outcomes spread out.

One caveat on advisors in particular. The OEWS wage survey does not include the self-employed, so independent advisors running their own practices are not in these figures at all. The advisor distribution above describes people on an employer's payroll.

So the finance degree salary question has two honest answers. If you want a predictable floor, the analysis family offers one. If you are willing to trade that floor for a far higher ceiling, the client-facing finance degree jobs are where the widest outcomes sit. The financial advisor salary page shows the full advisor distribution, and how to become a financial advisor covers the path into the job.

For most of the analysis and oversight jobs, the degree is the credential. For the client-facing jobs, it is not enough by itself. BLS names the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) as the main licensing organization for the securities industry and notes that a license is generally required to sell financial products or services. Personal financial advisors who buy or sell stocks, bonds or insurance policies, or who give specific investment advice, may need a combination of licenses that varies with the products involved. Advisors at small firms that manage client investments must also register with state regulators, and those at large firms with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Here is the part a student can act on. FINRA's representative-level qualification exams, such as the Series 7, require you to be associated with a member firm before you can sit for them, and BLS points out that because most of these licenses need employer sponsorship, companies do not expect new hires to hold them already. One exam is different. FINRA's Securities Industry Essentials (SIE) exam requires no firm association and is open to anyone 18 or older. It runs 75 multiple-choice questions in 1 hour and 45 minutes, costs $100, and a passing result stays valid for four years. To register, you need both the SIE and the qualification exam for your line of business, so passing the SIE before you graduate is a small, concrete way to show a securities employer you have already cleared the first gate.

Two other credentials come up constantly. The CPA license opens the audit and public accounting side of the biggest hiring pipeline on the list, but every CPA licensure pathway requires an accounting concentration, and a finance major usually does not include enough accounting coursework on its own. Our guide on how to become a CPA covers what that gap looks like and how boards count it. And if you are weighing the investment world's best-known credential against the accounting license, CFA vs CPA compares the two directly.

On the federal numbers, finance holds up well. All 11 finance degree jobs pay a median at least 50 percent above the $50,980 median for all occupations, five of the 11 are projected to grow faster than average, and together they open roughly 297,000 positions a year. That is a strong base for any bachelor's degree.

The caveats are specific, not vague. The best-paying outcome takes five or more years of experience to reach. The most familiar client-facing job is barely growing. Two of the 11 are shrinking. And the largest single source of openings, accounting and auditing, rewards accounting coursework that a finance curriculum may not include. None of that makes finance a bad major. It makes it a major where the choices around the degree matter as much as the diploma: which electives you take, which internships you land, and whether you sit for the SIE before you graduate.

So is finance a good major? For a finance major who plans those choices early, the data says yes. For a student who expects the diploma alone to deliver a six-figure first job, the data says the median is a long-run figure, not a starting offer. If you are deciding between finance and its closest neighbor, accounting vs finance puts the two side by side, including pay. If you are still weighing a business degree in general, is a business degree worth it takes that question on directly, and what can you do with a business degree covers the broader set of jobs.

Finance programs are counted under federal CIP category 52.08, Finance and Financial Management Services, and our rankings draw on that pool: 743 bachelor's programs, 165 master's programs and 55 associate programs.

The bachelor's is the working credential. Every one of the 11 finance degree jobs lists a bachelor's as its typical entry education, so a bachelor's-level finance major is what opens the whole table. Compare bachelor's in finance programs on cost, graduation rate and outcomes rather than on name recognition alone.

The associate degree is a starting point, not a finish line. None of the 11 jobs lists an associate degree as typical, so an associate degree in finance earns its keep mainly as a lower-cost first two years before you transfer into a bachelor's program. Confirm that your credits will transfer before you enroll.

The master's is an accelerant. BLS notes that a master's degree in a field such as finance or business administration may improve a personal financial advisor's chances of becoming a financial manager. If your bachelor's is in another field, it is also the most direct way to add finance coursework without a second undergraduate degree. The master's in finance programs ranking covers all 165 options, and our finance degree programs hub brings every level together in one place.