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Data on display
Field of degree: Humanities employment and wages

Domingo Angeles | September 2025

If research and analysis pique your interest, you might consider studying a humanities field. The humanities explore how humans think, communicate, and find meaning—for example, by studying literature, philosophical thought, or languages. Earning a degree in humanities can help you to hone critical thinking, writing, and other skills that employers seek for the workplace.

The chart shows 2023 employment and wage data from the American Community Survey (ACS) for workers in various occupations who had a bachelor’s or higher degree in one of five selected humanities fields: English, foreign language, philosophy and religion, theology, or culture and group studies.

In 2023, there were about 4.1 million workers who had a degree in one of the humanities fields shown. Workers whose degree was in English, one of the most common humanities fields, also led employment for humanities majors. The 1.9 million workers with an English degree were more than 5 times the nearly 345,000 employed with a degree in the lesser known field of culture and group studies.

Median annual wages for workers with these humanities degrees ranged from $50,000 to $68,000 in 2023, less than the median of $70,000 for workers across all fields that year.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) expands on these ACS data by pairing them with data from its Employment Projections program on field of degree pages. These pages highlight projected growth, typical entry-level education, and other occupational information for 37 selected fields.

And you can learn about hundreds of occupations, including fields of degree for those that specify one, in the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH). Information in the OOH also has details, such as what workers in the occupation do, the work environment, and pay.