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What Can You Do With an Economics Degree? Jobs & Salaries (2026)
Key takeaway: An economics degree is a quantitative analysis credential more than a job title. Most graduates do not end up with "economist" on a business card; they end up in analyst roles across finance, consulting, government, and industry, where the useful thing about the major is that it taught you to model behavior under constraints and defend a number. Median annual wages for the occupations this degree leads into range from $101,860 for management analysts to $124,720 for economists (Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025 OEWS national medians). The economist title itself is largely gated behind graduate study.
Jobs you can get with an economics degree
These are the occupations economics programs most directly feed into. The wages are national midpoints for people already working in each occupation, which in every case here means a workforce weighted toward experienced practitioners — read them as destinations, not starting offers.
View the data behind this chart
| Occupation | Avg. annual openings |
|---|---|
| Management Analyst | 98,100/yr |
| Financial and Investment Analyst | 25,100/yr |
| Statistician | 2,000/yr |
| Economist | 900/yr |
| Occupation | Median annual wage |
|---|---|
| Economist | $124,720 |
| Statistician | $105,650 |
| Financial and Investment Analyst | $102,740 |
| Management Analyst | $101,860 |
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025 OEWS national medians. A median means half of workers in the occupation earned more and half earned less; individual pay varies by employer, industry, geography, and experience.
Economist. Economists build and test models of how markets, industries, and populations behave, then translate the results into forecasts and policy or pricing recommendations. The work is genuinely research-shaped: assembling panel or time-series data, choosing an identification strategy, running the estimation, and writing up findings that survive review. Employers are concentrated in federal and state government (the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Federal Reserve system, Census Bureau, Treasury, and state revenue departments), research institutes, and large consulting and technology firms with in-house economics teams. This occupation carries the highest median wage in the table and also the steepest credential requirement.
Statistician. Statisticians design how data gets collected and decide what can legitimately be concluded from it — sampling frames, experimental design, survey methodology, uncertainty quantification, and the modeling that follows. Economics graduates land here when their coursework leaned heavily on econometrics and they kept building the programming side in R, Python, Stata, or SAS. The employers are government statistical agencies, pharmaceutical and clinical research organizations, insurers, and technology companies. The overlap with econometrics is real, but statisticians tend to own the method while economists own the question.
Financial and investment analyst. This is the most common landing spot for economics bachelor’s graduates. Analysts evaluate securities, companies, industries, or internal business lines: building financial models, valuing assets, writing investment theses or capital-allocation recommendations, and presenting to committees who will push back. Banks, asset managers, insurance companies, and corporate finance and treasury departments all hire for it. Advancement in the investment side of this world usually runs through the CFA program or an MBA rather than through another degree in economics.
Management analyst. Management analysts — the title most firms shorten to “consultant” — study how an organization operates and recommend changes to structure, process, cost, or strategy. A typical engagement means interviewing people who do the work, pulling and reconciling operating data, benchmarking against comparable organizations, and delivering a recommendation someone has to implement. Consulting firms hire economics majors heavily for this because the major produces people comfortable with ambiguity and quantitative argument, and much of the field is also staffed by independent consultants and internal strategy teams.
What the degree level changes
Bachelor’s level. The online bachelor’s in economics is a general-purpose quantitative credential, and at this level the roles you compete for are analyst roles: financial analyst, research analyst, credit analyst, pricing analyst, data analyst, budget analyst, and entry-level consulting. What separates competitive candidates is rarely the economics coursework itself — it is the econometrics sequence plus demonstrable ability in a statistical language and SQL. Employers screen on whether you can actually produce the analysis, not on whether you can describe it.
One title you should not expect at this level is economist, with one specific exception: the federal government’s Economist (GS-0110) series can be entered with a bachelor’s degree that includes at least 21 semester hours of economics and 3 semester hours of statistics, accounting, or calculus. That is a narrow and competitive door, and outside of it, employers using the economist title generally want graduate training.
Master’s level. The online master’s in economics is what makes the economist title and the higher-end research roles realistic. It deepens the econometrics and optimization toolkit well past the undergraduate level and signals that you can carry a research question end to end. It is also the standard credential for applied and business economist positions in industry, for senior government analyst roles, and for statistician positions, where a master’s is the common expectation. Economics has no license, no board, and no exam — the credential is doing pure signaling and skill-building work, which means you should be able to articulate exactly what the degree adds before you pay for it.
Doctoral level. A PhD is the entry requirement for academic economics, for research economist roles at central banks and international institutions, and for the litigation and antitrust consulting practices that hire PhD economists to serve as testifying and consulting experts. It is a five-to-seven-year research apprenticeship, not an extended master’s, and it is the right choice only if research is the actual goal.
A note on how to read the wages. Every occupation in the table above is credential-weighted at the upper end. Economists and statisticians are majority graduate-degree occupations, and the analyst and consultant medians reflect workforces with several years of experience. A bachelor’s graduate entering any of these fields should expect to start below the median and move toward it.
Common questions
What jobs can you get with an economics degree?
The occupations economics programs lead into most directly are economist, statistician, financial and investment analyst, and management analyst. In practice, bachelor’s graduates most often start in analyst titles — financial, research, credit, pricing, budget, or data analyst — and in entry-level consulting, while the economist title itself usually requires graduate study.
How much do economics majors make?
Median annual wages are $124,720 for economists, $105,650 for statisticians, $102,740 for financial and investment analysts, and $101,860 for management analysts (Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025 OEWS national medians). These are midpoints across everyone working in each occupation, and all four skew toward experienced and graduate-credentialed workers, so they are not starting salaries.
Do you need a master’s in economics?
Not for analyst and consulting work, where a bachelor’s plus strong quantitative and programming skills is the standard entry point. You generally do need a master’s to hold the economist title outside the federal Economist series, and a master’s is the common expectation for statistician roles. A PhD is required for academic and research economist positions.
Is economics a math-heavy major?
Yes, more than students expect. Intermediate micro and macro use calculus, and the econometrics sequence is applied statistics with regression at its center. Programs vary in how far they push it, but the graduates who compete well for the roles above are the ones who took the quantitative track seriously and paired it with R, Python, or Stata. If you want the analytical training without that intensity, compare business administration.
How is economics different from finance?
Economics studies how resources are allocated and how agents respond to incentives, at any scale from a household to a national economy. Finance is narrower and more applied: valuation, capital markets, corporate financing decisions, and portfolio management. Economics gives you a broader modeling toolkit and more government and research optionality; finance gives you a more direct line into banking and investment roles.
Is an economics degree worth it?
The degree earns its keep when you use it to build genuine quantitative capability rather than treating it as a general business major, because that capability is what the analyst and economist roles are actually buying. Weigh the tuition against your target role and level on the is an economics degree worth it page.
Keep exploring
- Start at the online economics degrees hub, then compare the bachelor’s and master’s.
- Look at pacing and cost with accelerated economics programs and affordable economics programs.
- Find programs near you through economics programs by state and city.
- Compare related fields: finance, statistics, data analytics, and business administration.
Data verified: August 12, 2026. Salary, employment, and tuition figures on this page are sourced from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (OEWS May 2025; Employment Projections 2024–2034) and the U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard (2023 cohort). The source agency and data year are cited inline with every statistic.