What Culinary Arts and Related Services Graduates Earn

Median earnings at 1, 4, and 5 years (College Scorecard)

The three rows below are the whole earnings story Scorecard can tell about Culinary Arts and Related Services: $45,406, then $55,056, then $49,323. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 10 programs at year one and 14 at year five, and the unweighted program median sits alongside so a reader can see how much the weighting itself is doing.

The trajectory is the story here: $45,406 at year one, $55,056 at year four, $49,323 at year five. That is 9% growth across the window Scorecard measures, worth $3,917 a year by the fifth year. Fields with flat early curves repay debt slowly; this one's curve demands patience from anyone carrying the median debt.

By Pell status, the year-one medians for Culinary Arts and Related Services are $44,939 (received Pell) and $45,467 (did not), $528 apart. The split is a reminder that a field median averages over very different starting points; the institution a student picks inside the field moves their personal figure more than the field label does.

Culinary Arts and Related Services is the only field in its two-digit CIP family that cleared this site's publication bar of 10 programs reporting at every horizon, which itself says something about how concentrated the federal earnings data are: whole families of study rest on a handful of reporting programs.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Culinary Arts and Related Services stands number 165 by five-year earnings and number 88 by first-year earnings, and number 172 from the lowest median debt. Those three ranks together are the field's fingerprint: high earn rank with a low debt rank is the combination students are actually shopping for, and this field's spread between them is 7 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Debt first, because earnings get the headlines: $27,000 is the median federal loan balance at graduation in Culinary Arts and Related Services, pooled from 7 reporting programs. Against year-one earnings of $45,406 that balance is 59% of a year's gross pay, roughly 7.1 months of it. The standard 10-year repayment at 6.52% (the 2026-27 undergraduate Direct Loan rate) runs $307 a month and $9,823 in total interest. Your own balance and rate belong in the student loan payoff calculator; the degree-level verdict belongs in the college ROI calculator and the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

The national median hides the real spread: inside Culinary Arts and Related Services, individual programs post five-year medians far from $49,323 in both directions. Below are the highest, filtered to programs with 30 or more graduates counted at five years; Southern New Hampshire University sits first at $53,877.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of Southern New Hampshire University's counted graduates earn less than $53,877. Weigh any program here against its own price using the net price estimator and the degree cost calculator.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 77.6% of the 1,972 graduates counted at five years, so the top of the table is a thin slice and not the field's center; and the leading program's five-year median of $53,877 sits 9% above the national field median of $49,323. Its graduates' debt figure is not published, one of the gaps this page leaves visible rather than filling.