What History 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 History: $38,779, then $52,505, then $55,010. Each median is graduate-weighted, built from 393 programs at year one and 485 at year five, and the unweighted program median sits alongside so a reader can see how much the weighting itself is doing.

From $38,779 in the first year to $55,010 in the fifth, earnings grow 42% ($16,231). For scale, the median bachelor's field in the Scorecard file grows from $45,010 to $65,763 over the same span, so this field's early-career slope is gentler than typical.

One more cut of the year-one data: Pell recipients in History post a median of $40,297, non-recipients $38,751. That $1,546 gap is the distance between two different student populations studying under one field name, and it narrows or widens by institution, which the program table below hints at.

History 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, History stands number 141 by five-year earnings and number 144 by first-year earnings, and number 55 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 86 places.

The debt side of the same degree

Debt first, because earnings get the headlines: $19,532 is the median federal loan balance at graduation in History, pooled from 370 reporting programs. Against year-one earnings of $38,779 that balance is 50% of a year's gross pay, roughly 6.0 months of it. The standard 10-year repayment at 6.52% (the 2026-27 undergraduate Direct Loan rate) runs $222 a month and $7,106 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

Program medians scatter widely around the national $55,010 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. Columbia University in the City of New York leads it at $95,624.

High program medians concentrate in high-wage metros and selective intakes, so read $95,624 as a market fact before reading it as a quality verdict. Costs for the same programs are checkable in the degree cost calculator and the net price estimator.

Two more facts about the shape of this field: the five highest-paying programs in the table account for only 0.8% of the 22,837 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 $95,624 sits 74% above the national field median of $55,010. Its median debt, $22,250, runs above the field median of $19,532, which is the trade a student at the top of this table is actually being offered.