Environmental engineers, geographers, and materials scientists all pay well and can be considered less stressful jobs compared to many other occupations.
The Department of Labor's O*NET OnLine occupational database includes survey-based measurements of how important various skills, activities, and personal traits are for a particular job.
One of the characteristics measured is stress tolerance, which O*NET describes as jobs requiring "accepting criticism and dealing calmly and effectively with high-stress situations." O*NET scores job characteristics like stress tolerance on a scale from 0 to 100, where a 0 means stress tolerance is not at all necessary for an occupation, and 100 suggests a job with a very high-stress environment.
Business Insider ranked occupations from most to least stressful using O*NET's stress tolerance score, with lower scores indicating less stressful jobs. Since we are interested in high-paying jobs, we looked at occupations that had stress tolerance scores available and with average annual salaries of at least $75,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics data for May 2022.
Several of the jobs fell in academia, including postsecondary teachers in various fields and researchers in economics, statistics, mathematics, and materials science. For instance, postsecondary economics teachers had a stress tolerance score of 63 and had an average annual wage of $122,750.
Based on the available data we used, models ranked No. 1 on our list. This job had a stress tolerance score of 51 and an average annual wage of $77,310. If we used median data for our pay metric instead of averages, then models would not have made the list — if we still looked at occupations making at least $75,000. That's because models had a median annual wage of $43,130.
The jobs below were ranked from most to least stressful. In the case of a tied stress tolerance score, we ranked by average annual wages. For instance, a few high-paying occupations had a stress tolerance score of 68, such as geoscientists and postsecondary mathematical science teachers.
Andy Kiersz previously contributed to this story.