PORTLAND, Ore. — It is the business of the Oregon Employment Department to track what Oregonians earn in the jobs.
Gleaned from the department's recent numbers on earnings in 2021:
- On average, telemarketers made $39,757 a year.
- CEOs made $230,750.
- Workers in farming, fishing and forestry made $37,283 a year.
- Computer and mathematical occupations paid $93,916 a year.
The OED, like the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, classifies jobs into 22 broad categories, such as legal occupations, which includes lawyers, paralegals and judges, or educational instruction and library occupations, which covers everything from preschool teachers to physics professors.
The state recently published average wages for all 22 job categories, including pay for individual jobs in each category. We looked at the average pay across all jobs in each category, along with the highest- and lowest-paying jobs in each grouping.
Many categories show broad ranges between the top-paying and lowest-paying jobs. For example, in the category that includes health care practitioners, orthodontists earned more than $300,000 on average while veterinary techs made less than $40,000.
According to the OED, wages have been rising everywhere during the recovery from the pandemic reduced recession, but so has inflation, with historic inflation levels threatening to wipe out real income gains.
See the full job and earnings data at the Portland Business Journal.
