Measure how money, work and prices actually behave, then say what a policy or a merger will really do.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Typical
$124,720
Entry analyst
$67,360
Senior or consulting
$238,060
The national median is $124,720 a year, and the bottom tenth start near $67,360. The survey only counts people whose job title is economist. Plenty of economics graduates work as financial analysts, data scientists or policy analysts and get counted somewhere else, usually for less.
$67,000 to $90,000
Research assistant or entry-level economist with a four-year degree
The Federal Reserve, other federal agencies and economic consulting firms all hire research assistants straight out of college. These jobs are the normal on-ramp, and most people do two years in one before graduate school.
$238,060 and up
Senior economists in consulting, finance and big tech
Antitrust and litigation consulting pays the most, because firms bill your testimony by the hour. University professors and government economists earn far less than that for the same schooling.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is a four year degree done cheaply, two years at a community college then a transfer to an in state public university, plus the graduate admission test fees. The high end is four years at full in state public price followed by a self funded master's degree, which is the expensive middle path because master's programs in economics are rarely funded. The doctorate is the odd one out: it takes five or six more years but usually costs nothing, because departments waive tuition and pay a stipend for teaching or research.
File the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) each year of college. The doctorate is the strange one: it is the longest path and the cheapest, because departments pay you to be there.
Federal pension and loan forgiveness
Agency and Federal Reserve work counts toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which cancels remaining student loans after 10 years of qualifying payments.
Conference travel
Employers pay to send you to meetings like the American Economic Association's annual gathering, which is also where hiring happens.
Your name on the work
Research economists publish, and published work follows you to the next job.
Remote and hybrid work is normal
This is a laptop job for most of the week.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Economics is a math degree wearing a suit. The further you go, the more math it is.
High school diploma
Grade 12
Take calculus if your school has it. That one course decides how hard the first year of an economics major feels.
Bachelor's degree in economics
4 years
Add real math: calculus through multivariable, linear algebra and statistics. An economics degree without math closes the door to graduate school.
Research assistant job
1 to 2 years
Two years at the Federal Reserve, a federal agency, a consulting firm or a university lab. This is where you learn to handle real data, and where your recommendation letters come from.
Master's degree or doctorate
2 to 6 years
A master's degree is enough for most government and industry jobs. A doctorate takes 5 to 6 funded years and is required to be called an economist in research and academic work.
Economist role
After graduate school
Agency, bank, consulting firm, tech company or university. The job title changes but the work is the same: data, models, and writing up what they mean.
Calculus
Not optional if you want graduate school later.
Statistics
Modern economics is mostly applied statistics.
Computer science
Coding in Python or R is how the analysis actually gets done.
English or debate
You will spend your career explaining a model to people who do not want one explained to them.
No board licenses economists and anyone can use the title, which is why the word turns up on television attached to people with no training. What is real is the federal government's hiring standard: to be hired into a federal economist position you generally need a degree with a set number of semester hours in economics plus coursework in statistics or calculus. Universities and research banks simply require the doctorate.
Plenty of strong undergraduate programs, and graduate admission cares about your math transcript more than your school's name.
Large public universities
State flagships have big economics departments, research assistant jobs on campus, and in-state tuition.
Liberal arts colleges
Small classes and close faculty ties, which matter a lot for graduate school letters.
Community college first
Finish calculus and the first economics courses cheaply, then transfer.
Anywhere with a good math department
Double majoring in math or statistics is the most reliable way into a funded doctorate.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Labor economics
Wages, unemployment, immigration, minimum wage. Heavy on government data.
Industrial organization and antitrust
Whether a merger will raise prices. The best-paid branch, and the one that ends up in court.
Health economics
Insurance, drug pricing, hospital behavior. Growing fast.
Forensic economics
Calculating what someone's lost earnings are worth in a lawsuit. Often self-employed expert work.
Python and R
The two languages economists actually use. Learn one well before you graduate.
A senior thesis with real data
The best single piece of evidence that you can do research.
A statistics or math minor
Graduate committees read the math transcript first.
Writing that a non-economist can follow
The rarest skill in the field, and the one that gets you promoted.
A growing number of people spend two years as a full-time research assistant before applying to doctoral programs. These roles pay a normal salary, sit at the Federal Reserve, universities and big tech companies, and teach you more practical skill than a master's degree would. They have quietly become the expected step for anyone aiming at a funded doctorate, which also means the competition for them is real.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Mostly a laptop. Pulling a public dataset apart, writing code to clean it, running models, and staring at results that do not say what anyone hoped. Then meetings: explaining to a policy team, a lawyer or a product manager what the number means and, more often, what it does not prove. Deadlines cluster around report releases, court filings and board meetings.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Alfred Nobel never endowed a prize in economics. Sweden's central bank created one in his memory in 1968, and it is awarded alongside the originals. Some of Nobel's own descendants have objected to it ever since.
The Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle called economics the dismal science in 1849. He meant it as an attack, and economists have been using the phrase about themselves ever since.
Forensic economist is a real job title in the national occupation listing. When a lawsuit needs a figure for someone's lost lifetime earnings, an economist works it out and then defends it on the witness stand.
The Federal Reserve Board publishes its own research paper series and openly advertises two separate career tracks, one for economists and one for research assistants straight out of college. Very few employers put that much of their work in public.
Last checked September 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in United States dollars, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published pay scales. They vary by state, employer and experience. Tuition is for in-state students at public schools unless the card says otherwise.