What Economics Graduates Earn

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

Nothing on this page is a survey response or a recruiter's claim: the $60,469 year-one median and the $88,456 year-five median for Economics come from federal earnings records pooled across 821 bachelor's programs. The headline median weights programs by graduates counted (27,629 at year one); the second column is the unweighted median program, printed so the method stays visible.

Five years out, the median graduate earns $88,456, which is $27,987 more than the year-one median of $60,469 (46% growth). Set against the median field overall ($45,010 at year one, $65,763 at year five), this field starts above the pack and ends above it.

The Pell split adds a second lens on the $60,469 year-one median: graduates who received Pell Grants earn a median of $58,906, and graduates who did not earn $62,781, a gap of $3,875. Read it as a map of where each group studied and the networks they carried in, not as the degree paying two different wages for the same work.

Inside its own CIP family, Economics ranks 1 of 10 published bachelor's fields by five-year earnings; the family median at that horizon is $63,401. Its closest sibling is International Relations and National Security Studies at $73,069, below this field's $88,456. Family comparisons strip out the broad field effect and leave the specific program choice exposed.

Ranked across all 182 published fields, Economics stands number 35 by five-year earnings and number 50 by first-year earnings, and number 18 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 17 places.

The debt side of the same degree

What does the median Economics graduate owe? $18,500, the graduate-weighted median over 269 programs with published debt figures. The ratio that matters is debt to first-year earnings: 31%, or 3.7 months of gross pay at the $60,469 median. At the 2026-27 undergraduate loan rate of 6.52%, the standard decade of repayment is $210 a month with $6,730 of interest on top. Model a different balance in the student loan payoff calculator before you borrow it, and sanity-check the degree in the college major ROI calculator.

Where graduates of this field earn the most

Program medians scatter widely around the national $88,456 five-year figure. The table ranks the reporting programs by their five-year median, keeping only programs with at least 30 graduates in that count so a tiny cohort cannot top the list by luck. Duke University leads it at $191,550.

A median is a middle graduate, not a promise: half of Duke University's counted graduates earn less than $191,550. 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 1.2% of the 31,281 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 $191,550 sits 117% above the national field median of $88,456. Its median debt, $13,000, runs below the field median of $18,500, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.