Best ROI: Salary per IQ Point
Careers offering the highest compensation relative to cognitive demands. Find where your intelligence pays the most.
Would you make this list? Find out where you rank.
Each row follows one rule. What fills the gap?Each row follows the same rule. What belongs in the empty cell?
Tap A to E. Your answer counts · 24 more after this · no sign-up
What's your IQ?
25 questions · about 12 minutes
What would you score? Try question 1.
Which option completes the grid? One tap, no sign-up.
Top 10
| # | Career | Per IQ point |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | $1,530 | |
| 2 | Data Scientist STEM | $1,426 |
| 3 | Chemist STEM | $1,348 |
| 4 | Teacher Education | $1,238 |
| 5 | CEO Business | $1,200 |
| 6 | $1,157 | |
| 7 | Civil Engineer STEM | $983 |
| 8 | Accountant Finance | $891 |
| 9 | Professor Education | $850 |
| 10 | AI Engineer STEM | $739 |
What the ranking shows
Some high-IQ fields like academia pay modestly, while finance and tech offer outsized compensation. Understanding salary-per-IQ-point helps optimize career choices.
Want to see where you would rank? A hard IQ test shows how you handle the top of the scale, and the Einstein IQ test compares you with the most famous estimate of all.
The IQ-style test the NFL used
Famous IQs are estimates. Yours could be real.
Before the draft, NFL teams gave prospects the Wonderlic: 50 questions in 12 minutes, and almost nobody finishes. We collected 241 reported player scores, each with its source. The average working adult scores about 21.
Other rankings
- Smartest College Majors by Average IQ
- All IQ rankingsPeople, characters, careers, majors and universities
What's your IQ?
25 questions · about 12 minutes